In geology, a hiatus is considered to be a gap in the rock record. When you look at rock layers, you are seeing a representation of time. A hiatus occurs when no deposition or erosion of sediments is evident and it appears that nothing has changed and no time has passed.
In truth the rate of sedimentation and erosion are simply equal so no record is preserved, although time passed as it must.
In life, too, hiatuses occur. We become still and unproductive, even though the moon still passes overhead. Change relentlessly impacts our mind, body and soul whether we will it or not, but we perceive only our own stillness.
Time
I have had almost no desire to come to this place of words.
There is a great stillness in me that aches, leaning towards all the sorrow of our lost honor, the relentless cruelty that has publicly obliterated the image of who I knew my community, my homeland to be. Kind. I thought of us as mainly kind.
Cold, still.
Now I only wish to duck my head and weep. The record of this will remain, sadly. Would that I might be the hiatus. Forgotten.
What would it take to see a sweeter image? How much ‘forest bathing’ would clear the slate of greed, hate geared manipulation, and simple selfish evil. Is there a story to image a grain of hope?
I have chosen to practice stillness. I do it for the simple purpose of creating a clear space to make skillful choices, those based on wisdom.
Please do not think this is an easy or simplistic road, and I promise that I do not tell you this because I wish to appear any better than I am.
I tell you because I wish to speak and move from a place of kindness, place that I hope will reflect the basic goodness that I believe, or perhaps only hope, we are all born with. If I can settle down enough to let heart guide me, rather than fear, the dominoes may fall that way.
Big Island East SIde
No, let me draw another image, take a fractal. It starts small in nature and mathematically repeats making designs of beauty. Tree limbs and snow flakes, broccoli and sea anemones are all examples of fractal design. Let me start small with one beautiful concept and move forward.
Let me be still.
Earlier this week I had a relapse of sorts. I fell into a vat of sorrow, distrust, fear, anger and hopelessness. Buddhists and Hindus call this by the Sanskrit word ‘samsara’. Guerlain, the Parisian Parfumerie, mistakenly named a perfume ‘Samsara’ and charged about $75 an ounce. Very chic. I am certain I have paid much more dearly in this life, and it is even sweet at times. They discontinued the scent, by the way. People were beginning to know the word in common parlance.
My vat of sorrow was the snake I had forgotten to look for.
Big Island West Side
Samsara is a word for the suffering that comes with not understanding my true nature, that is my relationship to ‘what is’. Samsara is simply the way things normally are, the human situation of wanting and not wanting things to be like this, right now. Not allowing for the fact that limitless prior events through time have converged upon this moment in the process of cause and effect.
I am only a tiny piece of this. One little short lived ‘cause’ whose effect is minute and probably ill chosen at that. Even when things go my way, and I am briefly happy, the fact that things will always change leaves me ultimately dissatisfied.
Change. The only thing I can really count on in the world of form, the world I live in.
Stillness is one way to step away from this deeply engrained and quintessentially human function of Want/Not want. It is not the answer, not the antidote, but it is a perspective from which I can possibly see more clearly.
Volcanoes National Park
What shoved me into that vat of slimy darkness was a random rabbit hole on the internet. No. It was less than that, it was a mouse hole. I looked up a definition and found myself reading history. The history that tried to envelope my soul was a list of 5 steps of Totalitarianism take over and how they were historically used in France, Russia, and Germany to destroy the existing governments. They sounded familiar and I grew ill.
Luckily I told a friend who guided me to look at a balancing note in history:
The Resistance Movement of WWII, The Civil Rights Movement, Women’s Suffrage (which my GGG Grandmother was part of), The Singing Revolution in the Baltic States, and work by Gene Sharp on Nonviolent resistance.
She reminded me to hold dear a true community and friendships. It saved me from my own small hell. I am grateful.
The Trees
Wanting things to be my way is not an option, neither is being separate from any of it. I often turn to the words of Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj for a sense of wise balance:
“I look within and see that I am nothing, and this is wisdom,
I look without and see that I am everything, and this is love.
Between these two, my world turns.” SNM
Hopefully, it will be this wisdom that ultimately guides me, not the fear.
This gift is from a known and moving poet. Worth sharing.
(slices of sorrow beneath the moon)
How to Apologize
By Ellen Bass
Cook a large fish—choose one with many bones, a skeleton you will need skill to expose, maybe the flying silver carp that’s invaded the Great Lakes, tumbling the others into oblivion. If you don’t live near a lake, you’ll have to travel. Walking is best and shows you mean it, but you could take a train and let yourself be soothed by the rocking on the rails. It’s permitted to receive solace for whatever you did or didn’t do, pitiful, beautiful human. When my mother was in the hospital, my daughter and I had to clear out the home she wouldn’t return to. Then she recovered and asked, incredulous, How could you have thrown out all my shoes? So you’ll need a boat. You could rent or buy, but, for the sake of repairing the world, build your own. Thin strips of Western red cedar are perfect, but don’t cut a tree. There’ll be a demolished barn or downed trunk if you venture further. And someone will have a mill. And someone will loan you tools. The perfume of sawdust and the curls that fall from your plane will sweeten the hours. Each night we dream thirty-six billion dreams. In one night we could dream back everything lost. So grill the pale flesh. Unharness yourself from your weary stories. Then carry the oily, succulent fish to the one you hurt. There is much to fear as a creature caught in time, but this is safe. You need no defense. This is just another way to know you are alive.
“How to Apologize” originally appeared in The New Yorker (March 15, 2021).
Time moves easily on, but I seem to be slumped in the corner here. I have a desire to move forward and accomplish something; this is the image of me slowly hardening into the amber, caught by the golden sunlight, unaware of my demise. I am sure that a reader might find this image of my personal lithification depressing. Please don’t. I am not so outrageous in most of my life, but a little macabre imagery seems to tickle me right now. Acceptance is a gift of the spirit; it is the movement of life with recognition of its own impermanence. Sometimes it makes me sad, sometimes I look right at it and laugh out loud.
Geology has always been my stabilizing rock, so to speak. It has given me the gift of perspective. In memory, I sit on a summer warmed granite rock, in the California Sierra mountains. This is my favorite type of rock; clean, hard, light colored. It was late in the development of the hot, pressure induced, liquid batholith which it grew from; it had more time to grow those lovely large crystals. Slow cooling of the original melted rock allows larger crystals of grey quartz, and pink or white feldspar, to form in a matrix, these are cut through by dikes (imagine cracks filled with another colored material that forms a discrete and interesting line through the more uniform, larger mass, of rock). Dikes arrive from an even later melt in the batholith with even larger crystals, some with a matrix of small dark, interesting things of a different chemical composition. These huge rocks where I rest, are weathered to the size of cars, buses, and palaces; a world of their own has been smoothed to a polished shine, here and there, by tons of glacier grinding past for thousands of years. I place a hand on its surface and feel my small, and very time limited, nature. Perspective. Lovely.
A very moving piece of art and poetry, donated to Autism Support. Worthy of a read.
AUTISM IN THE TRENCHES BY KIRI L. K. SALAZAR There is a foe, I cannot see Wired with hair-trigger senses. Conflict borne in infancy, Camouflaged in normalcy, My heart is sore, my soul fatigued Fighting Autism in the trenches. My Janus child walks a line between his world and mine I cannot cross his no-man’s […]
Be soft, do not let the world make you hard. Do not let pain make you hate, nor let bitterness steal your sweetness. Take pride that even though the rest of the world may disagree, you still believe it to be a beautiful place.
Kurt Vonnegut
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The Myth of Trees 