Borne back by the night, by the song of a piano in the fall, I stumble into something that feels like crying, or a heaviness of the heart that doesn’t quite lift when it should. Like a house at the turn of a stream, where the water forever falls, even in the hottest and happiest summers, the heart stands still while the world flows around it.
Looking into the rush of the water, I see stones that have kept their stillness and place, unbothered by the babbling around them, undisturbed by the algae, untouched by the fish – I try to embody the implacable peace and resignation of those stones, the way they so calmly exist without intruding. Longing for that stillness, I imagine sinking beneath the water and beneath the silence – beneath the fall and the winter and the spring to come – and there is a tranquility in that space.
There is a little sliver of grace in that moment – the water ever flowing, never the same, never replenished and yet never-ending. Masters of mindfulness sometimes offer the image of a pebble dropped into a stream to aid in achieving a state of meditation, the idea of the pebble sinking straight down despite the swirl of water around it. While water plants and animals swim and undulate in the currents of the stream, the pebble stays to its quick path, then remains where it lands – a point of absolute stillness and serenity no matter what madness whirls about above it.
I yearn for the certainty of that, for the grace of being within that stillness. We each seek it in our way, at least I hope that we do. It seems like such a noble quest. I want to believe we all want to be better, even as the world batters me with the irrefutable news of how awful we can be to one another. And then I wonder if maybe the world is already broken, like a tree that splits and crumbles under its own weight and some other unforeseen disaster, irreparable and irreplaceable, and we can only live in a place that’s forever fractured.
