Sarah Blondin is a free weekly newsletter. If you love it, consider supporting it financially. For $7/mo, you’ll gain access to my monthly Q&A and my serial-Folding In. The work I create here is reader-supported, hence the lack of ads and sponsors. Thank you!
Keeping Quiet
Now we will count to twelve
and we will all keep still.
For once on the face of the earth,
let’s not speak in any language,
let’s stop for a second,
and not move our arms so much.
It would be an exotic moment
without rush, without engines;
we would all be together
in a sudden strangeness.
If we were not so single-minded
about keeping our lives moving,
and for once could do nothing,
perhaps a huge silence
might interrupt this sadness
of never understanding ourselves
and of threatening ourselves
with death.
Perhaps the earth can teach us
as when everything seems dead in winter
and later proves alive.
Now I’ll count up to twelve
and you keep quiet and I will go.
~ poem, by Pablo Neruda.
Slowly walking through the forest, I pause every few meters and keep still. I interrupt the sadness of never understanding myself, letting the ordinary cradle me. When I choose to halt, I am reborn as I am. I remember my original state and take it with me, as indeed, I will again forget.
The more we choose to pause, this brief meeting with the divine becomes our ordinary state. We embrace the mystery and gentle breath into our being and so become stewards to the earth, moving as attentive and reverent creatures across her land. It is no small act to turn ourselves down, to solemnly enter our gentle hearts. It is something to celebrate, as we know too well how much fights against this type of existence. Even we refuse the quiet, for fear of being too simple.
The light I am choosing for myself grows like a vine in me, branching out to soften the weight of this life, and like a net, weaves itself around me with care. You can always tell when someone has this same net woven around them, for the perfume coming from them makes your heart feel safe enough to open in their presence. This is why we pause— to become another beam of this safety, for all to shelter under and together.
I am committed to staying limber in my practice regardless of inertia, critical self-talk, and deprecating thoughts.
I am arriving regardless of all that is trying to keep me away from the deeper, more loving, more fluid, trusting, and embodied self.
I am arriving regardless of the marches of protest within me—the multitudes of voices booming against my growth.
I am arriving no matter the wars waged and resistance mounting.
I am arriving.
It is curious to watch as one part of us can feel so mired while another more deliberate self grows alongside it. We rarely appreciate this aspect of ourselves.
