#20 - Stillness Yields Synthesis
Lately, my desire to do great community organizing work is colliding with my opposing desire to do absolutely nothing. To talk to absolutely no one. I see these opposing conditions however as two forms of the same movement within me, which is to know myself so that I can give the best version of myself.
How these two facets -- of stillness and doing -- present themselves, I seemingly have no control of. It feels like the 1960s and I'm driving a heavy car with its own thrust, its own momentum, down a long road with openness on either side, with a relaxed passenger smoking a dooby.
Then suddenly s/he wants to take over, grabbing and hurling me into the backseat while simultaneously, magically, gliding over the awkward machinery separating us to land behind the wheel.
I accept the change because I love being driven, not knowing where I'll end up, gliding through an open door to renaissance, a disruption I surely need.
I've come to see these changeovers, these moments of shock, slide, and surrender, as letting my life speak. While uncomfortably still at first, they are not idle times. They are the times when the most work is happening. When my brain is conjoining ideas buried in its sides and folds farthest from one another. Stillness yields synthesis.
I like to examine and explore what this landscape looks like, because it is different each time. It becomes what I imbibe. Sometimes it is a desert within an earthen pot, and I am inside looking up through the mouth at an indigo galaxy moving above a lens.
Other times it is a makeshift marshland separated from me by a window. A small frog watered to life in springtime taps music into the night air, fragrant like a river flowed from a brass spout.
Is this the disposition of a pavement pounder? Somebody set off to change the world?
It has to be.