falling prey to the routine

So it's been almost 2 months now. Things have gone very well. It's really nice to have an excuse for nap taking and reading. I've noticed some things that are frankly a little disturbing. Although I have been really enjoying the physical rest that sabbath brings, it seems that unwittingly I have stopped there. It has been hard to discern, but I feel as though non-sabbath thinking has crept into the sabbath. What I mean is this. A pattern has been developing: wake up, meditate and journal, eat, nap, read, make dinner, play games, bed. Overall not a bad way to spend the day. The problem enters when this becomes the routine every sabbath. While going through this routine I have found myself giving over to the mindless task of doing, not being. As I'm doing one thing my mind is already ahead, anticipating the next. This is not the key to mental and spiritual rest. This is a dangerous game for me, to subtly revert back to everyday thinking. It allows me to achieve physical rest, but the mind still desires multitasking and unnecessary obsession. Am I so afraid of what i might find in true silence and stillness?

A Familiar Whisper from a Stranger

"Sabbath is a stranger you've always known.  It's the place of homecoming you've rarely or never visited, but which you've been missing forever.  You recognize it the moment you set eyes on it.  It's the gift that surprises you, not by its novelty, but by its familiarity.  It's the song you never sang but, hearing it now, know inside out, its words and melody, its harmonies, its rhythm, the way the time quickens just before the chorus bursts.  It's been asleep in you all this time, waiting for the right kiss to wake it."

Mark Buchanan The Rest of God

This Moment Alone

One of the blessings--and greatest struggles--of practicing the Sabbath is practicing mindfulness of this moment.  It is so opposite of the career I have and the kind of person I am.

As a teacher, my success hinges on the ability to predict and plan for the next moment--who will struggle?  who will be bored?  how long left til the bell?  who will need encouragement?  who will need celebration?  who will need redirecting?  how can I change this lesson?

How do I turn that mind off on Sunday?  Let me tell you, it's a challenge!  Here's a typical mental battlefield through my thoughts dodge as I sit on my couch and try to be in this moment alone...

When should I start dinner?
What's Dave thinking?
Am I ready for school tomorrow?
When should we nap?
Should we take the dog for a walk after we get up?
Should I run later?

You get the point.

Sure, we can schedule a day to partake in worshipful rest...but did my brain get the memo?  Hardly not.

I think this endless mental striving is one of the curses of our 21st century.  After all, we live in a society where multi-tasking is a talent, busyness is success, and silence is sinful.  Who in their right mind is in this moment alone?

And that is the point to which I arrive today.  Perhaps being in this moment is not about the right brain.  But we all have two sides to our brain...don't we?  And couldn't we ALL use a little more left brain?  Time to create.  Time to imagine.  Time to bathe in beauty.  Time to applaud chaos and exalt unknowing.  Time to ask questions without demanding answers.  Time to get lost in the details and surrender the big picture to Supreme Artist.  Time to just...be...

I desperately need time in this moment alone.  I need to honor my left brain more.  For I commiserate with these words:  "Being in a hurry [is my biggest regret in life].  Getting to the next thing without full entering the thing in front of me.  I cannot think of a single advantage I've ever gained from being in a hurry.  But a thousand broken and missed things, tens of thousands, lie in the wake of all that rushing"  (Buchanan, The Rest of God)  Being in a hurry makes me look and feel more productive (a mere illusion), sure...but in the end it leaves me--and I imagine those to whom I connect--empty.

So on a recent Sabbath, I stopped.  I sat in a moment alone.  I stopped waiting for the next.  It was a forceful and wondrous snowstorm which transfixed my view.  And my left brain celebrated the tiny beauties and melodious paradoxes I witnessed.  I captured them.  In a poem.  I created. 

"Now"

I sit in a Sabbath snow globe

listening to the silent, still, secret snowflake whispers.

The snowfall suffers confusion,

first tumbling vertically to the earth, then

stolen and sidetracked by sweeping thieves of wind, 

finally swirling and twirling around the centurion pine--

who rises as a centennial axis.

The graceful carousel of quiet nothingness eternally spins.

Must the snowfall have a direction to fall?

Or does it just...

Fall?

Be?

Surrender control and blur into white identity.

There is no next moment; only now.

A million small, lacy snowflakes scramble

outside the glass pane.

A million nows.