walking toward stillness

the great unclog

It’s windy out right now. All the windows are closed, but I can hear it — low rumbles and whistling gusts punctuated by windchimes. The dogs are sleeping. And I’m walking toward stillness as I begin a weeklong silent retreat that begins tonight.

The part I dread is my body. The back pain. The hip pain. The knee pain. Eventually, even the ankles hurt.

The mind part, though, I can’t wait. I feel like an overly messy whiteboard. It’s so packed with dates and names — both of which keep peeling off and floating away. All of the tangled cords of my mom’s estate — phone calls to lawyers, bankers, financial planners, insurance companies (all of whom seem to prefer the phone to email); placing things on Marketplace, taking other things for resale, and others to a local charity; finding space in my house for what remains. The paper I still need to finish for my graduate program. The garden to be cleared out and readied.

This is what’s happening inside my brain right now. (Photo by Michael Jang, 1987)

And I can’t make it stop.

So this week: Silence. Stillness. No big moves. Gentle, small, whatever fits in my cupped hands. Right here. Precision. Intention.

Earlier today, I turned down a writing-related job that I usually would have jumped at, but I realized I was grasping. I said yes because part of me knew it would be fun; this part ignores the part that’s exhausted, that can’t pull a name out of my left anterior frontal lobe. The exhausted part is usually ignored by the rest of me because paying attention to it means not doing. It means less not more. Turning off the phone and down the invitation and away the knock at the door.

My mom’s condo is down to about a dozen large items — dining table, bed, an oil painting… and many small things that either don’t matter at all, like her random collection of small holidays puzzles (?) that probably just need to be tossed, or that matter tremendously but only to me, like the mint green ice cream scoop that we’ve had my entire life. My mom may have gotten rid of her landline just months before her death (RIP 4714), but she still had this scoop. And I am keeping it.

So this week, amid the bodily pain, I’ll be watching my mind jump from enormous items of concern — environmental collapse, war and suffering — to the smaller ones that really don’t matter and need to be on their way (are the neighbors upset with me? should I go to Minnesota in July?), or that do matter to me in some way that is worthy of my attention. This last group are like that scoop. They matter precisely to me. The people, ideas, creative projects, places I love. They matter, and they will all end. Which is becoming increasingly bittersweet.

I hope a big clog will be cleared. Like when you finally get wax removed from your ear and the process hurts and is the most satisfying thing ever. Pain worth signing up for. Stillness worthy of nothing.

The minimalist painter Agnes Martin (above is her series “With My Back Against the World”) said: “To be an artist, you look, you perceive, you recognize what is going through your mind. And it is not ideas. … A lot of people will think that social understanding or something like that is going to lead us to the truth, but it isn’t. It is understanding of yourself. And for that, to make a beginning on that, you have to look in your mind and see what you are thinking about. Because the truth is, you are unconscious of your own thoughts until you catch yourself.”