SILENCE AND AWAKENING
1.
AND THE SILENCE THAT IS
Winter trees bring to mind eastern gods, whose many limbs curve gracefully, touching the universe in all directions. When the wind rocks their branches, a few last marcescent leaves whisper eerily. The world brims with foreign languages, spoken much as we speak—by passing air over solid forms whose various holes and flexings fine-tune the sounds. It doesn’t matter whose or what’s breath is used, or sometimes what liquid, since sound travels so well through water. The great Lake Cayuga, deep and soupy with life in late summer, and shaped by millennia of erosion and sediment, has its own key, and waterfowl and frogs float their calls on the water. Sounds carry over frozen water too—in the Arctic, voices can travel for a mile across hard flat snow.
A friend has invited me on a silent retreat. Relatively silent. After all, the birds would still sing and call, the leaves rustle, the cicadas scrape, the wind sough. Exclude them, leave the galaxy even, and there’s still the background hiss from the Big Bang, which radio telescopes record as a sort of hoarse streaming sigh. I mean human silence, which on this retreat also includes turning off the wordless communications, what the Japanese call haragei (ha-ra-GAY), body language, gesture, facial expression, a telling glance.
“Soon silence will have passed into legend,” sculptor Jean Arp warns in Sacred Silence. “Man has turned his back on silence. Day after day he invents machines and devices that increase noise and distract humanity from the essence of life, contemplation, meditation. Tooting, howling, screeching, booming, crashing, whistling, grinding, and trilling bolster his ego.”
Once a year, on a changing day in April, people in Bali celebrate Nyepi (nn-YEH-pee), a national day of silence that follows the dark moon of the Spring Equinox and ushers in the Balinese New Year. On this Hindu holiday, both car and foot traffic are prohibited (except for emergency vehicles), radio and TV must play low if at all; village wardens keep people off the beaches; work, socializing, and even lovemaking stops, as a nation sits and falls silent together, for one day of introspection in an otherwise hectic year. Not only does the dawn sound different, it smells different. Without the reeking exhaust from cars and trucks masking subtler scents, the air smells naturally floral, and it’s enriched by the green aromas of vine-clad forests.
During Nyepi, surrounded by the incense of wildflowers, one mulls over values, beholds the balance of nature, meditates on love, compassion, kindness, patience. Dogs bark, cicadas call shrilly, but the streets breathe a quiet rare for that clamorous island, a silence framed like a painting. Not the silence of deep space, nor the hush of a dark room, but an achieved silence, a found silence that’s refined and full. The Japanese word for silence, mokurai, combines moku, silence, with rai, thunder, creating a sense of silence as a powerful force, a reverse thunder. One doesn’t fall silent when tasting impermanence—the sting of everything appearing, disappearing and changing from moment to moment—but undergoes silence, creates silence, becomes silence.
There are many forms of silence: the silence after raindrops fall on the metal roof of an old corn binder pickup truck; the silence just before the word “silence,” and just after; the silence of light cutting through the pool water to stencil giraffe hide onto the bottom; the silence that exists when your dead mother no longer calls your name, the silence inside manicotti-shaped sleeping bags when the sleepers have left; the silence of one’s DNA when one is scattered dust; the silence of neurons sparkling in the lens of a scanning electron microscope; the silence inside the ear when a phone call ends; the silence thick with the silences of loved ones; the silence of other paths one might have taken; the silence of recluse firmaments glimpsed through a telescope; the silence between one’s hands cupped in prayer; the silence that water striders leave in their wake, the silence of a yolk-yellow sun running atop the horizon at dawn; the silence that we package into seconds and minutes, the minute silence of all packages, the silence of the crying baby one never had; the silence of swimming in thick furry ocean; the silence of snow pressed against one’s closed eyelids; the silence that hung in the air after you said “Will you write those thoughts down?” when what you really meant was “Will you write those down for me?” the silence of the fog left by one’s breath on a chilly morning; the silence of your name before you were born; the silence of slow-motion memories; the silence of quaking aspen leaves viewed through a window; the silence of wandering thistledown; the silence of igneous rock; the silence of mirrors; the silence held by the b in the word “doubt” the infinite silence reflected in all silences; the silence of an inactive volcano; the silence of the heart’s stilled motor.
Death is the silence in an invisible valise carried under one arm. As we walk, an elbow leaves room for it. Through a window I see quaking aspens fidgeting silently (the glass baffles noise) in a dumb show of shivering leaves. Surely my death will dawn like that: first the aspens will flicker; then the scene will fade to black and white; leaves will spin even faster in the wind, but silently, and I will have been.
2.
MISSIVE
An ancient definition of dawn is the moment when one can recognize the face of a friend. A morning phone call delivers the news of the death of John O’Donohue, lark-tongued Celtic poet, philosopher, theologian, ex-priest, and what the Irish call an anam cara, a soul friend. At first my brain denies the hearsay and refuses to add it to its library of facts. In shock and disbelief, my brain trips all over itself, then I feel the sudden monstrous subtraction that comes with the death of parent, child, grandparent, sweetheart, special friend. Two and two no longer equal four, the world comes unhinged, and a draft blows through it. I may grow old enough to know many loved ones who didn’t wake to see the dawn, but I feel fortunate to have had a friend as divinely articulate as John, someone so in tune with life.
He loved the thisness of things, as well as their poetry, and especially loved thresholds and awakenings and dawn. “If you had never been to the world and never known what dawn was,” John once said, “you couldn’t possibly imagine how the darkness breaks, how the mystery and color of a new day arrive.”
“Subversive” was a perfectly odd and daring word that he favored, one that evoked an insurgency of belief, an insurrection against habitual ways of knowing, a charity of awareness, blessed by the heart’s iambic, despite the ego-mad I am’s of everyday life. Presence mattered, perhaps more than anything, because he understood the tragedy of being absent from one’s own life.
I loved John’s belief in the feral soul of poetry. He found poetry a kind of attentiveness, a form of endless rebirth, a mystical path to the divine. He understood, as truly as glass understands light, the ability of poetry to heal a mutilated world. And so he practiced Dharma poetics, poetry as a vehicle of awakening.
The first Irish poem, declaimed by Amairgen in 1700 b.c., as he stepped onto shore and claimed the land for his people, presents his spiritual and supernatural heart:
I am the wind which breathes upon the sea,
I am the wave of the ocean,
I am the murmur of the billows,
I am the ox of the seven combats,
I am the vulture upon the rocks,
I am the beam of the sun,
I am the fairest of plants,
I am the wild boar in valour,
I am the salmon in the water,
I am a lake in the plain,
I am a world of knowledge,
I am the point of the lance of battle,
I am the God who created the fire in the head.
“This ancient poem,” John writes in Anam Cara, “preempts and reverses the lonely helplessness of Descartes’s ‘cogito ergo sum,’ I think therefore I am. For Amairgen, I am because everything else is. I am in everything and everything is in me. It is a oneness first known between mother and child.”
We once spent a day coteaching a workshop called “Awakening the Senses, Romancing the Words.” We focused on how the lamp of art allows one to shine light into dark corners, glimpse the intangible, spell beauty, and pan through the flow of experience for nuggets of illumination. This was a writing workshop about paying close attention to life, using poetry, story, myth, and meditation to honor the call of beauty and develop our capacity to find it in the most unexpected places.
I called him O John, and we were slated to meet at a symposium a few months from now, and again at a mindfulness retreat in late fall. I already lament those missed reunions and confluences of hearts and minds. But mainly I feel lucky to have known one of life’s sublime celebrants for a few of his dawns. In the spirit of his poetic “blessings”: may your mornings greet you with such a friend.
John’s poetry and prose is so deliciously smeared with the senses that I can picture him now, fiercely alive with the electric fizz of being, not dead, just out of reach for a while, writing in his seaside house in Connemara, Ireland. My mind furnishes his house and places him in it, as it always has—how can he not be there now?
O John, the first light this morning that doesn’t shine for you hangs on the air like old yellowed linen. Shouldn’t there be scarlet banners celebrating your passionate verve? Or at least a plume of color staining the sky the way you left your imprint on everyone, reaching deep into them, finding their state of highest grace, and helping them rise to it? You knew the best one could become, the plateaus of being, and the thresholds that arise, frighten, but must be crossed to become the self one dreams. I didn’t know you often, but deeply, as a pilgrim side of me.
On the last evening of your life, you slept with your fiancée, Kristine, felt saturated with joy, having spent the happiest day. You were that rare man who met the girl of his dreams and stayed happy for the rest of his life—but only a few hours remained of it. You were fifty-three, planning a marriage, picturing the faces of the children you hoped for, full of a thousand blessings. For hundreds of thousands of years, most of our time on this planet, people could expect a life span of only eighteen years: still, fifty-three seems shockingly few.
Everyone who ever spent time with you came away changed. It’s not that you were nobler than other noble souls, or more devout, or kinder, or more reverent. You drank too much, were prankish, could be hilariously irreverent. But you lived your words about being present in the world, you were able to be utterly alive in an era of distractions.
Had you awakened, you would have found the sky right where you left it, the way we all do, your sweetheart beside you, nestled in the aura of romantic love with all its hallelujahs. Your future included a new collection of poetry and prose called To Bless the Space Between Us, and the silent blessings of all your students and readers, the newlyweds whose vows you blessed, the mourners whose loved ones you buried, the parents whose newborns you helped christen, and the flock of spiritual seekers whose hunger you fed.
We all died last night, as we do every night. Waking is always a resurrection after what might have been death. What would dawn have been like, had you awakened? It would have sung through your bones. All I can do this morning is let it sing through mine.
3.
NOTHING DOING
In a dream, I’m flying above thick heavy storm clouds at dawn into a zone of sunlight with streaks of blue sky and wispy clouds. I see a heavy blanket of cloud stretching below me, and under that all of life on earth gyrates. I feel like I’m floating through the noncorporeal mind, floating after death, away from earth, from body, from sensory awareness. After the momentary shivers and terrors comes a sense of freedom. I don’t want to return to the storm. Aloft, all is white, an antarctic vista as far as I can see, white but with dimension: puffs here and there, sinkholes, hills, occasional tints of pale blue smeared across endless pastures of smooth white.
Slowly, I become aware that I am in my mother’s mind as she was dying seven years ago today, in a hospital I know well, in her mind that had stopped holding on to earth and let herself float, float up through clouds beyond the body, to a realm of sky with blue striations, slowly rising and feeling no senses, no action or activity, yet an awareness of a self floating up out of the self, through the gates of the mind. As her mind began floating away beyond anything like thought, word or want, a granular white fog moved in, obscuring even the clouds.
Then I realize I am looking at the marbling of the body, the flesh and fluids, seeing from inside the tissues. Looking down, I can feel the body beneath the broken clouds of consciousness, the body with its flowing channels and pastures, its microbial cities and swamps, and dense neural pathways. Then an array of clouds obscures the body, hovering thickly in white ridges and dark grey anvils. We fly right into one surging cloud, become immersed in it, and fly out the other side. Wispier clouds swim across the emptiness like small thought fish.
Floating somewhere between the body and the mind, I spot a long waterway stretching from north to south, irrigating the lands all around it. Through a hole in the cloud floor, I see a wide winding river and miles upon miles of farm fields. Then slowly floating even higher, we enter an area of blue sky and pure yellow sunlight with stray clouds above, and curving all around the bowl of the horizon. The clouds move closer, and I climb knowing that when I pass through them I will enter pure air, pure starlight. It is not so bad parting with the earth. There is great relief.
Life is teeming, anonymous, and disposable. Some religions encourage a loss of self, in essence a glimpse of death during life, with a welcome escape from the struggles of identity. Still, I’m fearful. One is always too young and unready, too polite, too dignified for such radical decay. In this dream the sun blurs the horizon with gold, night and day meet in one quadrant of loss, an indivisible quiet. A heavy white blanket lies below and cloud banks press on the trigger points of morning. Soon we sink between layers in a white-out bleak as noon on a glacier. Finally, through a long grey coma of clouds, we descend.
I wake up slowly, consciously, trying to remember the softness of my mother’s beautiful pale skin, the exact pitch of her upbeat voice, what she looked like as a slender young woman, her changing hairstyles over the years, and as many happy memories of being with her as possible. Not a lot of those memory twigs exist, unfortunately, and I could use some to nest in now. Marcia died three years after my father, Sam. A sense of mourning has been shadowing me for days, the way it sometimes does as her birthday approaches. I’ve no desire to visit her grave because I believe she’s not really there but has rejoined pure energy, once again a shimmer of atoms at dawn. The locals don’t say “passed away” but “passed,” which sounds a bit more mystical, as in “passed to the other side” or “passed through the veil.”
I sense her in the atomic mother-brightening dawn that’s glowing chestnut with platinum geysers. I wish our time together had been more intimate, that I’d known more of her dreams and sorrows, understood her better, and that she’d felt known by me. No use fretting over lost possibilities. I hear real peace comes from loving one’s fate, not just accepting it, because life is as it is and how one responds is what yields happiness or discontent. Loving your fate without trying to fix it, without asking the universe to be anything it’s not, is easier to phrase than to feel, except as desire, and, ironically, the desire itself contradicts the lesson. I find it a state of grace hard to reach. Like trying to frame problems as invitations, not challenges. These fine adjustments echo through the halls of morning.
In Tibetan monasteries, one learns to practice a “death meditation” at dawn. Upon waking, instead of joining others for sitting meditation and chores, one lies in bed with eyes closed, and says to oneself: “I’m going to die tonight. What shall I do with the rest of my time?” This isn’t meant to be a rare occurrence in the otherwise smoothly slathered hours of one’s life, but a regular practice over months or years—because it might be true of any day, and certainly will be true one day. Cuddled up with my loving dear? Looking at photographs of my mother? Strolling down the street and feeling the sensations of being alive and in motion? Admiring the beauty of the natural world from sunrise to sunset? Writing a poem? Doing good for the loved ones and others who remain on earth? I begin to appreciate and schedule my allotted hours to what matters most, and that’s a tonic to carry into waking life.
The birds start choiring early on, as if they’re dragging the sun up to please the aborigines who dream it with song. A flock of starlings flies over like a pack of noisy children. Yellow-white crystals of sunrise give whatever they strike a brilliant blue luminescence, and it’s as if my mother left her awe everywhere for me to find, especially today, lit by the luminol of dawn.