Stillness
JUNE 24, 2014
As a little girl, one of my favorite activities was going “to town” with my Nana. She worked in Ogden, and on Saturday mornings we often took the bus to the mall. We would wait early in the morning, standing in the freshest air of the day that always felt cool to my small frame. She patiently told me to stand perfectly still so that the sun could catch me and keep me warm. She promised it wouldn’t take long if I could just be still. Of course, as a 6-year-old girl, anxious to go to town with my grandma, stillness was impossible. I can still imagine her, standing completely still, head turned slightly up, welcoming the sun as if they were the oldest of friends.
I’ve been thinking a lot about stillness lately. Taking time off work has offered a rare chance to slow down and savor the ticking away of the day. Although stillness implies a lack of action, it may have more to do with our state of being. In nature, there is a thread of stillness that extends through air to tree and down to the flower and dirt underfoot. There is great life, but there is also patience and wonder. There is great power in stillness, and when I reduce the clammer of competing tasks and figuratively slow down, turn my soul toward calm, I begin to see and feel the raw beauty of life, just as I see the beauty of a thick forest.
As my mom neared death she became increasingly still. Physically, she lost the ability and desire to move and work her worn-out body, but the stillness I saw and felt in her soul came when she surrendered to the inevitability of death. I watched as neighbors, friends, and my own siblings came to see her, many of them to say goodbye. She would smile and let them hold her hand. They would be full of anxiety and uncertainty, but she was calm and assuring. She had found peace, and the rest of us were trying to catch up to her. That is the way it always was, us trying to catch her goodness and her unyielding attention to what she believed. Even in death, she showed me how trust God and to meet hardship with grace.
She passed away in the afternoon of a stormy, gray day. We gathered as a family for several hours, not wanting to fully realize the depth of what we had so recently lost. That evening, I collapsed by the desk in my front room, nestled between a bookshelf and desk legs. I couldn’t make it any farther. I clung to a letter she had written me at Christmas because I needed to see her writing and feel her love; I needed some part of her to be with me. The perfect curves and loops of her handwriting calmed me, steadying my sobs and leading me to calmness. I sat there until I felt the stillness of her love embrace me.
Not long after those first wrenching days, I decided to seek more stillness. Everything about my life had altered, the vision of what I saw in the future changed forever. I needed to simplify and “front only the essential facts of life” (Walden, Thoreau) in an effort to live deliberately. The turmoil of loss still ebbs and flows throughout my days, the pain often tears through my body leaving me broken afresh, but after the siege, calmness returns. When it does, I let it soothe my always-raw wounds. I focus on her love and release into the stillness.