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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Let me be still.