on stillness

expanding the pause, and other attempts

I’ve become rather mesmerized by the silhouettes of trees at dusk.

I posted a photo that I’d taken of one on Substack’s notes the other day, and it appears to have mesmerized quite a few other people as well, resulting in a little uptick to my subscribers. If the “tree as lungs of our planet” photo/note brought you here, welcome! I was moved by the number of thoughtful responses to that image. I love that about this platform, the sort of communal learning that can occur, often unexpectedly.

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There was an art project we did in elementary school that involved painting a wash of watercolour over the paper to create the effect of a sunset, then using a fine paintbrush dipped in black ink, painting the outline of a bare-branched tree. It was a successful assignment - everyone seemed pleased with how their painting turned out, they all looked impressive hanging up on the wall of the art classroom, and when I brought mine home in my cardboard portfolio at the end of the semester, my mother was so pleased with it she took it to be framed, and hung it in the front entrance of our home.

I’ve often thought about trying out that art project again in adulthood, setting myself up with some watercolours and ink, trying to recreate one of the trees I see on walks in my neighbourhood. I haven’t got that far yet, mostly I just snap photos of them on my phone.

As a small child I planted trees with my grandfather. I remember the saplings in a metal bucket, the spade I got to use, the larger shovel he would carry. We would walk along a path, scooping earth, planting the sapling, gently stepping on the earth around the young trunk, not too firmly, he told me, and using the big green watering can to water around the roots. Once we were done, he would have me kiss the tree to help it grow. I remember the soft prickle of pine needles against my face. I remember wanting to plant another one right next to the one we had just planted, but he would tell me how big this tree was going to grow and how much space its roots would need, and we would walk further down the path before breaking ground for the next tree. I cannot visit those trees any more, but I am lucky to live in a place where I am surrounded by many other spectacular trees. I am trying to make more time to stop and take in the intricate detail of their branches and offer a moment of gratitude for the work that they do. Now, they remind me of the value of rootedness, of having a protective layer, of adapting to survive harsher elements (“they slowly increase their cold tolerance at the cellular level”, an internet search tells me), and, in winter, without any leaves to rustle in the wind, they also remind me of the importance of coming to stillness.

More and more, I am being drawn to stillness. It seems an obvious antidote to the non-stop busyness of this season, but it is yet another item that falls into that expansive category of the elusive obvious. Like so many, I have been in very busy mode for quite some time now and I am noticing more and more how it takes away from how and who I want to be. How when I am filled with a sort of perpetual frenetic energy, running from one thing to the next, always thinking or planning or working on the next item on the list before I’ve even finished the last one, then I am not properly present for the people I want to be present for, nor fully tending to the things I want to be tending to.

I have come to recognize that accepting or fostering an endless state of being busy can be a trauma response. Yes, it can be a way to have a full and bustling life, full of experience and growth, but it can also be a coping strategy. By engineering a life in which I have minimal time for stillness, I have been attempting to avoid my troubles by eliminating any of the space or time required to think about or process them. It may seem counterintuitive, but increasingly I am finding that a key to keeping going is actually knowing when to stop. Inevitably, if I do not make any time to rest and recharge, to think and to process, that time will come and force itself upon me, either through illness, injury, insomnia or other sneaky tactics.

I was chatting about this yesterday with one of my sisters, when we stumbled onto the truth that coming to stillness is easier said than done; it can often be quite overwhelming. When we keep ourselves busy all the time, and then suddenly encounter a chunk of open time in which all the things we have been keeping at bay with our busyness can finally surface and claim our attention, it will likely feel somewhat uncomfortable (or, depending on what we’ve been suppressing, very uncomfortable). Since that conversation, I’ve been thinking about some of the baby steps to stillness I’ve been attempting lately, how I’ve been an apprentice to stillness, slowly increasing my capacity to accept that discomfort and move beyond it. I’m going to share some of these attempts below, but I would love to hear about your relationship with stillness too. Do you avoid it, make time for it, or do you seek it out and cultivate it? If so, what are your favourite ways of coming to stillness, and what benefits do you notice? What counts as stillness to you and what doesn’t?

Baby Steps to Stillness (an apprentice’s list)

1. Starting the day with Richard Wagamese’s Embers: One Ojibway’s Meditations. I received this book as a gift from a dear friend a few months ago (thank you, Lynn!) The first section is titled “stillness” and contains beautiful reflections on the value of stillness and silence. Here is one of my favourites:

   I am not created or re-created by the noise and clatter of my life, by the rush and scurry, the relentless chase or the presumption that more gets more. No, I am created and re-created by moments of stillness and quiet. I am struck richer by a pure solitude that allows me to feel the world around me and lean into my place in it. I am not the rush of words in my life’s narrative. I am its punctuation. Its pauses and stops. I am my ongoing recharge; in this silence I am reborn.

   - Richard Wagamese, from Embers

2. That part about being the punctuation, the pauses and stops, makes me think about yoga class, how we are encouraged to expand the pause between the inhale and exhale of breath, then again between the exhale and the inhale. I am working to notice my breath more, and to expand the pauses, not just during yoga class.

3. Speaking of yoga, last summer I started going to a restorative yoga class. I am late to this party, but in case you have never tried one out, the idea with restorative yoga is that you come into a posture, or shape, and then, supported by assorted props (bolsters, blocks, sandbags, eye pillows, blankets), you sink into this shape and remain there for 4-5 minutes. Slowly you come out and find your way into another shape, and repeat. I attended this class once a week over a five week period, and it was interesting to observe how impatient I was at first, when I had not understood this was what the class was and wanted to be moving more continuously. At first, my mind kept busy even as my body came to stillness, not wanting to waste time, but it soon won me over. One day I described it to my husband as my “fancy napping class”, because that was sort of what it felt like, but I came to appreciate how skillfully I was being guided to stillness, and how when I intentionally set aside some time for it during my waking hours, my mood and my sleep improved quite dramatically.

4. Going for a walk, finding a bench/rock/log, and sitting there for a while. Not reading or looking at my phone, just sitting, observing what my senses are taking in.

5. Noticing when I am feeling that frenetic energy of non-stop activity and asking myself if I am busy doing things I want to be doing, or if I am busy because I am avoiding stillness.

6. I have accepted that I am not someone who is able to sacrifice sleep regularly enough to form a daily meditation or writing habit at 5am. But I have seen that there are still benefits to showing up, even occasionally, in the liminal spaces. The times when almost everyone else around you is asleep but you are awake, the times when the world is quiet all around you and you have to be quiet too - then you can observe. Sometimes I wake naturally around 4am and rather than fight it, I get up, make a cup of tea, taking care to make each movement as silently as possible so as not to disturb the rest of the household, watch the steam rise from the mug, listen to the furnace turning on and then off again, and after a bit of stillness, doing nothing, I’ll open my notebook and write for a while.

7. Stopping to look at tree silhouettes or nature’s shadows. Resisting the urge to capture them all on camera (good luck!)

8. Baths.

9. Short, guided meditations have also helped me on my path to stillness, I talked about some of my favourites in this post from last January. My own improvised, unguided meditation: closing my eyes, and picturing being underwater in a lake, when the sun is shining through the water. Imagining my thoughts like the particles in the water, slowly settling to the bottom of the lake.

10. Not reaching for my phone first thing after waking, but lying still for a few more moments, and thinking of two or three things I am grateful for that day.

    

    after tree silhouettes, I am also always seeking out nature’s shadows

Sending love, light and stillness,

Rebecca