Mythic Beauty & the Return of Silence
The world had lost it’s Mystery until an excruciating journey in a beautiful land returned me to my senses.
A depth of beauty that had become mythic in my imagination has returned to me now. A vigor I believed lost to youth—born of indulgence in sensory pleasure and the sheer delight of taking life slowly.
Somehow in my aging and accumulation of responsibilities, I never noticed myself rushing through life here in Canada. The North American heartbeat thrums hard and unforgiving, and I had forgotten that I once danced to a different drum. Scarcely noticing the moments tick by, I raced from one lovely meeting to the next… from one meal to the next, hardly stopping for breath in between. Though most things in themselves were a delight, the sum totaled nothing more than an endless parade of to-dos.
If I’m honest, I couldn’t bare to slow down long enough to breathe… to eat… to simply be without accomplishing something. Staring out at the forest from my chaise longue felt a gruesome waste in a life where there was so much to be written, read, cooked, played, listened, watched, and lived.
Though I remembered well that I once lived and loved by Gertrude Stein’s admonishment:
“It takes a lot of time to be a genius. You have to sit around so much, doing nothing, really doing nothing.”
―Gertrude Stein
… I couldn’t seem to manage it. Instead, I shrugged off my own ineptitude by keeping busy in cycles of creation. Emails to write… clients to see… blogs to post…
But nothing lit me up the way the smallest facets of daily life once had.
Our beautiful, improbable world had lost it’s Mystery.
You know what I mean.
Yes, YOU!
Who live in the mundane without ever truly seeing the world around you.
Tell me… when was the last time you stopped to marvel at life?
Keys turn in a lock, tumbling so many tiny levers and latches to create the last impossible CLICK that opens a door…
An autumn leaf at last lets go its quiet hold on life, falling willingly to the forest floor to become the anonymous mulch beneath my feet…
The din of airport chatter as a thousand worlds collide in sheer linguistic splendor…
A single strand of pasta flung with precision hangs on the wall in a moment outside of time, holding its breath for what comes next…
The roar of mountain stone towers over a highway—so many lives pass below ignoring its silent thunder…
Content with my beautiful house and daughter, I thought smugly that the joyaunt luster of youth had simply passed by me. If I pondered it any more deeply, I blamed my blasé on my circumstances—I don’t have the time or energy to rekindle a flame long-since burned cold.
My recent visit to France blasted down the walls of my busyness and in their place built… nothing.
Silence has returned to me. A silence that whispers of how it waited every day for me to return. Those lost moments of my early adulthood when I cultivated quietude in hopes of catching poetry on the wind were not in vain. They created a foundation, a resting place for me to return.
I would be lying if I spoke now of the marvels of the Path to find this place. It is littered with the debris of my identity and everything I thought I wanted for myself. This secret Beauty—for me—lay not beyond a field of flowers, but behind excruciating trials. At every turn, I was asked who I wanted to be, and only through the sheer will of my long training and a remembered glimmer of lost hope, did I make the difficult (and worthy) choice again and again.
Again and again I set the meager concerns of this life aside and made the choice of the Soul. Again and again, I was uncomfortable, displaced, threatened, challenged, and afraid. Again and again, I turned to the magic… to the tools that have been burned into me through trials by fire. Again and again, I found breath… Life… and Beauty beyond imagining.
Magic is not for the faint of heart. It’s not a Disney story to comfort you on cold and lonely nights, and the story doesn’t begin with living happily ever after.
But there is gold at the end of the rainbow, for the alchemist who’s ready to undertake the journey.
Happy travels, my beautiful Heretics. A bientôt.
Wow, your writing has a whole different energy to it! Why is it that we’re so afraid of being quiet and still, doing nothing? It’s always so powerful when we are able to flow in the present and notice the magic all around us.
Allysha- This might just be one of my favorite things to have read this week: “The din of airport chatter as a thousand worlds collide in sheer linguistic splendor…” I can see it, I can hear it, and I can almost touch it. Stunningly put.