Today

Mary Oliver + places to be kept still

Today

- by Mary Oliver

Today I’m flying low

and I’m not saying a word.

I’m letting all the voodoos of ambition sleep.

The world goes on as it must,

the bees in the garden rumbling a little,

the fish leaping, the gnats getting eater.

And so forth.

But I’m taking the day off.

Quiet as a feather.

I hardly move though really I’m traveling

a terrific distance.

Stillness. One of the doors

into the temple.

---

I was looking for a quote on quiet. The perfect poem, above, appeared. I love that about our world of internet-ed-ness.  But what about the things that are not to be easily found— or shared?  Where are those spaces and how are we to maintain them?

I am a bit biased I suppose: A good deal of my algorithmic feed is peppered with spiritual  spaces, intimate moments, peeks of what I enjoy, yet my hermit self does not open that same door. I can remember being in indigenous spaces and intimate times where capturing the moment was not only frowned upon, but forbidden. I’ve held that wisdom close: Let the unknown places stay unknown. Times have changed and there is so much support in the swing towards connectivity. However, these space-sharings are also practices we indulge in that feel good in the moment, thank you oxytocin, but are false flags of emotion and actually create a monkey of a burden.

For instance, I recently heard a story of a woman who changed her hiking plans because she wanted to post pictures, “Where all the good hikers went.” I asked my friend, the story-teller, again and again: “So she changed her plans for her social media posts? Not, her experience?”

“Yes,” he answered every time I asked. 

I was shocked. I never would even consider that.  Shortly thereafter there was a home renovation show on Netflix that included in every makeover a social-media spot to increase marketing and traffic. I was flummoxed.

It reminded me of a research paper that I wrote in graduate school that sought to understand the largest influencers on children—as I recall, I had discovered what we already know: Children that have a guardian and a solid support structure, in general are not deeply affected by what they see on television, but children that do not have an adult figure to intervene and help them understand the difference between real behavior and imagined, children that do not have solid adult figures to emulate, they are deeply disturbed and influenced by media and entertainment. This paper was written in 2003 before social media. 

But my post here is not a discourse on children per-say; it is on the inner child or the inner temple that needs the stillness and the quiet.

A few years ago, when the New Year’s fireworks shook the house, and my dog cowered in the corner, my then boyfriend said: “We live in a neighborhood of 2 year-olds.” I suppose he meant that the draw of loud audacity with no concern for others is much the same flamboyance as two year-olds, who are still learning definition of self and boundaries, blithely naive to the interconnectedness of it all—spreading havoc whenever they tumble. 

Inter in Latin is the combo of “in” (into) and “terra” (Earth).

And interestingly this is what I found for the etymology of “net”: Old English net "netting, network, spider web, mesh used for capturing," also figuratively, "moral or mental snare or trap," from Proto-Germanic *natjan (source also of Old Saxon net, Old Norse, Dutch net, Swedish nät, Old High German nezzi, German Netz, Gothic nati "net"), originally "something knotted."

So fascinating.

So this net, that we are now living for and through— how does it invite us into that Inner Temple? And if it does or does not, where do we draw the curtain, the line, the “not for public consumption” demarcation on our private lives?  Do we have private lives? Or do we need to be seen to prove it so? Do we have a need—or even a relationship with silence? With stillness? What happens to the magical moments of the unseen that can only be lived or felt, yet barely known? Do they exist or do they need to be validated?

The Tao says: “Stillness is the ruler of haste.”

Perhaps today we take the day off, as Oliver suggests and drop into Us. Perhaps if we slow down, the question answers itself quietly.

The way we weave on the wisdom is sharing it with others.