Be Still & Know

I wrote this two years ago after my summer living in Tennessee.  After a year and two weeks now of ups and downs teaching, these words again remind of the truth I so often and easily forget...stillness, Sabbath, rest, solitude all precede living and loving well.

“Come breath, go breath; I’m not going to pull any longer.”  ~ Nana Ruth Keith

If only we understood the deep wisdom of these words.  This kind of breathing is of the kind of living that overflows from the deep well of freedom.

Free from the desperate striving and agonized clutching that are the ladder climb to ‘success.’  Free from the anxious heartache of one who has lost control.  The metronome marking the rhythm of this breath is not heard among the ringing, dinging, clanking of our scurried lives.  It is the rhythm of the silence of the darkest hour of night, before the dawn, as the symphony of birds await their cue.  It is the rhythm of the rain as it tumbles down the leaves and pats upon the ground.  It is the rhythm of the lightening bugs as they paint their portraits in the sky.

“Be still and know that I am God.”

Stillness and ‘non-motion’ are hardly the same.  Rather, stillness invites the most elegant and vigorous dances of motion.  In stillness, all the world arrives at once.  The blackberries and raspberries are sweetest when they are left on the vine just one day longer.  The stillness of the harvester’s hand is not apathetic or lazy or ignorant as it waits.  It is moving in time with the movement already and always swirling through the pulse of life.  The same the moonflower and the wren’s eggs and the human heart.

“Be still and know that I am God.”

Oh the patience of stillness requires more endurance than a marathon!  To be still is an act of great humility…surrendering one’s self-importance, one’s assured autonomy, one’s skill, determination and strength.  Courage is not the absence of fear, but the absence of self.  And still illumines our deepest fears of self.

“Who am I?  Am I able?  What is the measure of my value?”

“Will the raspberries ripen for tomorrow?  Will the wren’s egg hatch?  Will the moonflowers open their blooms if the moon’s light is lost in the clouds?”

And yet, with each inhale the lungs relinquish the breath to be exhaled.  In stillness, we see and hear and smell and taste and feel the pulse of this rhythm calling us to open our selves, to open our hands and spread our arms wide in the embrace of freedom.

“Be still and know that I am God.”

And in this freedom, we stop looking for our own reflection in the people of our lives.  We stop chasing our own shadows.  Rather than seeking to shape people into our own image and squeeze every moment into our best laid plan, we begin to look into our own eyes and remember that the essence of our existence is the rhythm of our breath.  We are not ‘alive’ until our first cry or breath and our death is marked by our final exhale.  And then we begin to look into the eyes of the neighbor and the mother and the stranger and the friend and remember that the essence of their existence is the rhythm of the same breath.  We look at the food we eat grown from the plants which are nourished by our exhale and remember that they too have life by breath.  We see the mark of eternity within the breath of every person and in the heartbeats and roots of all living things.

And thus, in our stillness, we begin to know God.

“Be still and know that I am God.”