Sound and Silence

Are you looking for me? I am in the next seat.

My shoulder is against yours.

You will not find me in stupas, not in Indian shrine rooms, nor in

synagogues, nor in cathedrals:

not in masses, nor kirtans, not in legs winding around your own

neck, nor in eating nothing but vegetables.

When you really look for me, you will see me instantly –

you will find me in the tiniest house of time.

Kabir says: Student, tell me, what is God?

He is the breath inside the breath.

-Kabir

We are in a downpour and I am running out of dry wood for the fire. I want you to hear this sound – the one the rain makes against the cedar shingles and walls of our lightly insulated structures. In trying to describe it to you, I keep finding myself telling you it sounds like something else, metaphor, when this, what it is, is the only thing it really sounds like.

The tall redwoods along the top of the pasture hills are waving their branches in the wind, slightly, almost a timed back and forth. The smaller, lighter trees are being blown, with greater motions, branches being tossed side to side. The cows care nothing for the rain, one way or another. They are in the pastures, as slow and still as ever, mouths chewing cud at the same rate and temperament as when the sun is shining.

I am newly on the other side of my Vipassana meditation experience, having only been back on the ranch for a few days. The activity of Vipassana is much like the cows’ constant chewing in the same fields day after day, unfazed by weather, temperature, or scenery. It is the practice of awareness and equanimity – observing and experiencing sensations, or thought reactions to sensations without losing the balance of your mind. In my ten days of silence and 128 hours of meditation, I began to meet and touch the places in myself where I want to bolt instead of endure. I began to meet the places where I feel bored with subtleties and alive with intensity. I began to meet the ways I prepare to avoid, build ideas and images of possibilities, rather than wait to meet the reality of the thing.

This is all a lot to take in. It is too much to tell you about everything that occurred. There were many discoveries, observations, tears and laughter – alongside new perspectives of my reactions, words, behavior, and actions or professions of love in my life. And to cap it all off, new ideas and further transformations of what it is to live a life of devotion, to move into a type of salvation, to see God as a new idea, taking on a new form. There are days to come where these stories and moments of awareness will unravel; but to begin, I will stay with the cows.

In all of my sittings in the meditation hall, there was a breaking point – whether it was one of physical or mental reaction, a loss of awareness, or something more visible as tears or a smile or a shift in posture. The steady and even-keeled cows seem to have a breaking point as well. Hail. Apparently being pelted with hard, round objects is the end of their equanimity. I respect this. The large mother cows are walking a bit faster but not fast, changing their direction and heading for the redwoods for cover – while their babies run quick and awkward by their sides.

Sometimes in meditation I felt like the baby cows, just waiting for someone else in the group to decide enough was enough and then I could bolt and not have to endure it any longer. Of course it seemed that everyone else could walk away slowly like these mother cows, with nonchalance in their movements, like it was just time to move to another part of the pasture. The erupting in emotion or bolting from the scene is something I was working on, and something I will continue to work on. It has been my pattern to fall apart in overwhelming moments, to lie on the floor, asking for a way out. It is important to note that the way out I was asking for always meant to be snatched up out of the thing; and it was certainly not my responsibility to take myself there.

My friend Andy has a yoga teacher that he has been devoted to and practicing with for many years. Last night I was looking on her website about an upcoming course she is offering. In the description she says, “I have never been disappointed by a single deep practice, quite the opposite; whether I have sustained it or not, I have always been healed, amazed, elated, humbled, lit-up and erased in the best of ways.” This statement speaks well to my meditation experience, and gives me hope for continued practice in my life of the activities of my devotion.

Soon enough this morning, I will pull on my rain gear and tend to the farm, hauling in wood, bringing food to the goats and chickens, checking the blanket on the horse. The world does not stop when unpleasant things find us. The chickens still need fed and the wood still needs chopped. And as the beginning of my meditation experience has taught me, everything is an opportunity for observation, and I can choose and practice how I meet each sensation.

Sitting in the kitchen and watching the storm roll through our hillside over the last hour continues my lesson in Anicca – that everything will change, is impermanent. From moment to moment, the sound of rain changes, as does its direction, magnitude of size, and multitude of drops. For thirty seconds there is hail and thunder, with an immediate dessert of thick fog that stays again for only so long, minutes maybe, and then passes or rises to bring the garden and animals back in view. With the sound of hail, Toyone, the resident Australian Shepherd, leaps off his bed in the corner and finds his way to be hidden under my feet.

I have a habit of being declarative – to say out loud, in word or action, “This is the way things are.” I have resolved to let things simmer, like how well-steeped tea tastes so much richer than immediately drinking, or how soup is always better the second day after the flavors have fused together. Everything is in constant motion, always changing, rising and passing away.

Toyone has fallen asleep underfoot, while the wind has continued to push southwest, the rain has ceased for the time being, and we are left with the undertones of the fireplace clicking from its heated metal container.

All of this time, in the many places life has taken me, I have still been looking for God – in characteristic, and likely, in my own image. I do not mean that God is like me – rather, I mean that I am beginning to wonder – if as followers of any major world religion – if we have made God out of our own human image. I could always really get behind this idea that God was someone to know, that God was a pronoun. I could be moved by the idea that God was someone I could have a relationship with, feel close to by pursuing certain practices, or read the happenings of my life to mean that God was pursuing me. I wonder if God is personal in the ways I have thought for so long.

The meditation we were learning and practicing is known to be the meditation of Buddha – the meditation that Siddhartha Gautama experienced, attained full enlightenment, and then taught as a service to many people each day for the last forty years of his life. Most of the discourses spoke about how we are in our own misery and that we create it by reactions and patterns of craving and aversion. The meditation is meant to move one out of these patterns and reactions, therefore bringing one out of their misery and generating a greater capacity of compassionate love for all beings.

It seems that a longing or craving for God can exist similarly to other longings. In Christianity it is often looked at or talked about by saying that all of our longings are really longings for God. I wonder if a conscious longing for God is really just a longing to get outside of oneself, one's situation – and it is easier to pray and ask to be snatched up or saved by some force or hand other than our own. I do not know what seeking God really looks like – and I have stopped being upset by this mystery. I guess, it is not that I don’t think God can save me from my situation or my own mind, but I don't think that God is in the business of doing so. I think maybe God is doing other things – or that God speaks and moves with far more subtlety than any of us would like.

If I were to tell you to read one book – one book once or over and over again for the remainder of your days – I would tell you to read Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters by Annie Dillard. If there is a spiritual text that I retreat to in my life, it is this one book of short stories. If there is one thing I have truly practiced in my days, it is reading this book, with devotion, and always with pleasure.

The title story in this book is among the most meaningful to me – a story I have kept close to my heart, like soothing balm on this longing for God. She writes about silence, about nature and the ways that God use to speak to us loudly, directly – and now, how we are looking for God everywhere, praying for God to open his mouth.

Once, in Israel, an extended family of nomads…heard God’s speech and found it too loud. The wilderness generation was at Sinai; it witnessed there the thick darkness where God was: “and all the people saw the thunderings, and the lightnings, and the noise of the trumpet, and the mountain smoking.” It scared them witless. Then they asked Moses to beg God, please, never speak to them directly again. Moses took the message. And God, pitying their self-consciousness, agreed.

It is difficult to undo our own damage, and to recall to our presence that which we have asked to leave. It is hard to desecrate a grove and change your mind. The very holy mountains are keeping mum. We doused the burning bush and cannot rekindle it; we are lighting matches in vain under every green tree. Did the wind use to cry, and the hills shout forth praise? Now speech has perished from among the lifeless things of earth, and living things say very little to very few. Birds may crank out sweet gibberish and monkeys howl; horses neigh and pigs say, as you recall, oink oink. But so do cobbles rumble when a wave recedes, and thunders break the air in lightning storms. I call these noises silence. It could be that wherever there is motion there is noise, as when a whale breaches and smacks the water – and wherever there is stillness there is the still small voice, God’s speaking from the whirlwind, nature’s old song and dance, the show we drove from town.

I would say that all of Dillard’s writings are about these subtleties – this looking and finding of God in insects and silence, rocks and walking from here to there. Every word is an observation.

Writing is proposing. It is a perspective of a moment; and like all moments change, so does the perspective. Even if I say that God is or is not this way, it is the god of the moment, in this perspective of time. Writing is playing with ideas, and often, finding truth, however enduring.

If you were to ask me for another title, I would give you two more Dillard books: Holy the Firm and Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. And then, if you asked again, I would be like any good teacher and tell you I will give you no more until you have thoroughly practiced what has already been given. And so it is with spiritual life and teachings. We are so hungry, feeding off so many different things, never satisfied. We are digging shallow pools instead of deep wells – and if you are like me, to truly meet someone who has been digging in the same place for many years, their tone and resonance is striking, like they have met God and come back to tell us about it if we ask.

Spiritual life is hard and can leave us hardened. The experience of Vipassana, along with the teachings that accompanied the meditation experiences, left me with an old and refreshing idea of what it is to be a follower or a devotee, to anyone or anything. To begin with the most known example in my life would be to say: Find what you love about Jesus and practice it in your own life. Maybe discover what you love about other enlightened persons from spiritual history and employ those too. Maybe rethink if God is a person to get close to or if God is a thing, many many different things, or even, just a force. Maybe it is changing the idea or enacting a kind of practice or devotion that will heal the wound, rather than trying and trying to reconcile a distance that is likely unquenchable by the means at hand.

I am constantly amazed at what appears in my mind and life when I keep my eyes scanning, looking for contact.