Stillness Like A Balm
Self Soothing In Jarring Times
Dear friend,
“I don’t believe in God,” I said, voice thick with resentment and dented pride.
“Yes dear, but He believes in you.”
I can’t recall the lady’s name, I think it was Margaret who said those words to me. At the time she was in her early seventies. Mentally clear, physically vital, she was a volunteer with Kim, the boy we helped support in Sheffield.
She was incredibly kind and emanated a quiet wisdom, happy to share that one pearl of wisdom, she let it silently drop into the depths of me. I didn’t have a reply. She felt no need to say anything further. She just smiled and met my eye, briefly. That was about as much eye contact as I could stand in those days.
Those were pivotal months with Kim as rays of light began to penetrate the sleepy fog of my ego obsessed self imprisonment.
A process that takes its own sweet time to unfold.
An earlier memory surfaces of a house party when I was a teenager. I’d drunk as much beer as I could get my hands on but was still on my feet. The party was blaring away and I needed to get out, the air in the place had started to close in on me. As if it was pressing in on me from every direction, something stagnant forcing its way inside.
With a crushing teenage passion for boredom, I realised the only reason I’d come to the party was from a fear of missing out. Usually I’d be chasing someone I was intrigued by, but I think by this time I’d exhausted the few romantic options open to me and so this was the most likely root of my disenchantment.
My male friends seemed to get pleasure out of causing carnage, I believe a hole was punched in a wall at some point during the night, but my main interests were dancing and girls. I didn’t have the capacity to hold enough drink that would make it okay to damage someone’s home. I was way too polite for destruction of that order.
I unlocked the kitchen door and wandered into the back garden which backed onto some kind of public right of way. It might have been part of the old railway line, my memory is hazy due to the alcohol. It was early morning. The dew soaking into my brown suede trainers and the hems of my drainpipe jeans. Behind a barbed wire fence stood a small black pony. I ripped a handful of grass from my side of the fence and offered it to the pony.
I was a bit wary of it but the pony wasn’t afraid of me, and my drunken state suddenly seemed to lift as its breath blew on my wrists, flaring its delicately shaped nostrils as it munched on the torn grass. Our eyes meeting, the pony’s presence pierced my isolation and I felt the world opening up inside of me.
I began to speak with the animal, a confession of sorts.
I was so locked in in those days. There were places inside I wasn’t equipped to go. A stranger to myself, believing as many do at that age, that we know the world we have yet to step into.
I cried as I recall. The tears a surprise and an inevitability. The loneliness that we live with when we are separated from ourselves, I just didn’t have the maturity to deal with the loss I’d encountered so far in my young life. With no human to talk to, I poured out my heart to the pony, who eventually lost interest in me. With one last look they wandered off in search of plumper pickings.
The animal’s honesty reassured me. I figured could face the world if there were beautiful creatures like the small black pony in it. They held so much more dignity than my sorry alcohol soaked insecure self.
I probably left then and walked home in the early dawn as the town stirred into activity. Cars on the bypass heading in search of parking places at the out of town supermarkets. If it were a Saturday I may well have walked straight to my Saturday job, nursing a hangover in amongst the musty boxes in Woolworth’s stock room until sweeping up time.
It’s amazing how much physical stamina you have in your teens and twenties.
This morning I was with Angelo outside the post office in the tiny village of Moncucco Torinese. We leant against the wall waiting for the clerk to boot up the IT system, watching the pigeons flying around the ancient brick buildings.
The place was filled with a delicious stillness that settled on us like a balm. One time my separated self would’ve experienced the village as barren of life. But that’s not how it is.
The stillness unmasked the immense energy that fills the spaces between things. The aliveness of existence manifesting out of the non manifest.
I still don’t believe in God.
It’s not about belief in a concept, it’s about direct experience.
A relationship we’re having with the source of life.
Feeling it within and without, in everyone and everything.
It’s hard to talk about.
I like the way Sydney Banks put it.
“When it comes, it comes as a nice felling.”
Just that.
Simple and ordinary and yet transcendent.
Transcending the limiting isolation of the false self’s mental prison.
What we’re searching for is inside us.
A sentence like that means nothing without the inner experience of a nice feeling.
Calming and evening the breath for a few minutes, turning the mind towards an uncomplicated and reciprocated love. Inwardly giving thanks for the present moment, for anything we can pleased or grateful for, brings us closer to this nice feeling.
We can’t access it when we’re judging or mentally beating up on someone. Thoughts do not leave their source.
Hence the lessons of the great teachers and saints.
Daily gratitude, stillness, forgiveness, thankfulness, meditation, prayer. In the world not of it.
The happiness we seek is inside.
Nothing is the world can substitute for it.
It looks like it will.
But experience teaches otherwise.
Till tomorrow
Love
Mikey