The weather today is my favorite - around sixty degrees and light rain. I like the grayness and the rain so light I feel I could walk between the drops. Somewhere in Raymond Chandler, I think The Big Sleep, Marlowe says, the world was a weary wetness. He may have said, warm wetness - but I like weary better with its suggestion of stillness. In weather like this, everything seems suspended, quieted, and when I look out the window things blend in the low contrast and become all of a piece.
Stillness and all of a piece...they're so difficult to find as I move through my days. So often my mind is very loud, with non-stop chatter about superficial things, and instead of feeling all of a piece, whole and harmonious, I feel conflicted, ambivalent, full of doubt. Those feelings grow out of what I think of as my terminal self-consciousness, my ego constantly weighing and measuring how I'm doing, am I right or wrong, can I do everything, or anything, right, what if, if only, I should have....
Over the years, I've learned how to step back from that constellation of black stars. I've learned how to let go, to turn my angst or fear over to whatever exists beyond my babbling ego. I've learned in meditation to find a still point which I have only for moments at a time, but it means everything to know that stillness is inside me, a refuge that is always there.
Dante's Inferno begins, "In the middle of my life, I came to a dark wood." I feel so often in the middle of a muddle, but I'm not heading to darkness as I used to fear, but to light, to moments of stillness and harmony. I have to surrender the muddle again and again, but each time I do I'm pierced with the possibility that I can live with the light inside me, always available when I reach for it. It's more than a possibility; it's real and there and steady.
Each surrender is a new beginning. I'm always coming a great distance in order to begin.
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