Silence, Wisdom & The Whispers of My Neighbors

The quiet snow-blanketed field just past our gate…

In late March of this year – at sunrise on the morning after our Governor declared a stay-at-home order – I went outside to watch the Sun climb up over the Eastern horizon. It took me a moment or two before I realized I was hearing something I’d never heard before. Standing in the still-slumbering garden of my suburban home, I listened, mesmerized, to the unrecognizable sound of silence. It was an elixir of such blessed disorientation I could never have imagined. Just a few weeks later, as the mornings started warming up, standing in that very same spot, I would hear another thing I’d never heard before in this suburban landscape. I would hear the quiet conversations of my neighbors while they were outside with their coffee and tea in the morning. I would hear their intimate thoughts and their practical strategizing and the quiet sounds of indoor lovemaking with early Spring open windows. On some mornings, depending on the direction of the breezes, I would hear things as intimate as whispers.

I’ve not gone to very many festivals. The density of people and intense social atmosphere has, so far, proven far too overwhelming for me. But the thing I remember from all three of my festival experiences is the early morning time, when the ‘village’ begins to stir. Sounds of human stirrings, the sounds of pots on stoves, water heating, and quiet muffled sleepy laughter punctuated the thin, quiet air of morning in a way that made something so old, so heartbroken and lonely in me, drink in drops of nourishment and belonging. Community so close I could hear them kissing, stretching, and telling their dreams in their tents. Each time I was reminded of the ice storm that stopped the New England world of business-as-usual when I was about 8 years old. The power went out as the ice-laden wires snapped in two, and my family of four temporarily moved into the living room in front of the fire, to keep warm and heat our food. There we slept and ate. I can’t remember much else from this never-before and never-again moment with my family. We were not a close family (to say the least) and yet, somehow, I think the forced intimacy and the shared adventure, allowed us to become the family each of us secretly wished we were. As March of this year unfurled into April…into May and then June…I watched a similar thing happen to my little cul-de-sac here in Boulder. And in particular with my dear neighbor family to the East. As if an old wisdom for how to be human received long-awaited nourishment and there we were – the old-world versions of ourselves. The ones who know how to share food and seeds, partner up to buy greenhouses, and prioritize sunset conversations, sharing fears and visions, over a bottle wine.

On of the sweet ponies who lived with us for a brief, and delirious moment in time.

Circling back to my opening sentence…I acknowledged I have been very quiet these last 8 months. And that is not as intimately accurate as I want to be with you here. The truth is, I have been silenced. In that moment standing in my sleepy Spring garden, the fierce directive that has partnered with me for the last two decades was unplugged like an umbilicus disconnected from the navel of The World. Like the inflatable seasonal lawn figures when they’re unplugged. Just flattened. In place of my decades of exuberant and unquestioned dedication – and the words that went with it – was an alarmingly simple question. One that has continued to walk with me these many months. Simply, in the silence of my backyard, something insisted I ask: of what use am I? What is my value? What good am I?

I felt certain I ought to wait to receive an answer before I opened my mouth again. So weeks went by. And then months. ‘Certainly’…I thought, ‘if I don’t know why I would say a thing, if I can’t see the point of saying a thing, I should just do everyone a favor and not say anything?!’ One of the endless soul assaults throughout my life has been the experience I’ve had living in a culture in which so many humans, and to be statistically accurate here – men – endlessly say things about things. And as they say things about things, they fortify the now-impenetrable culture of knowing ­– there is only one way to know anything. One source of information. And one body of information worth knowing. Which, of course, is a disembodied conglomerate of re-shaped facts, hand-plucked from the vast and diverse river-body that is Truth. Here in this anemically curated school of thought, you’re in or you’re out. I was almost always out. The things I was told were important seemed, to me, hopelessly irrelevant; things that would cannibalize my imagination, my connection to The World, to dreams, to Mystery. The things I was devoted to and consumed by were not even acknowledged by the culture…which, I quickly learned, was the most definitive of judgements. If it wasn’t even mentioned, it didn’t deserve to exist.

Now, on the first morning of my 56th year, I can no longer be generous or cautious with my language. I’m overwrought by the endless talking, the endless podcasts, the endless new theories and proclamations, ideas, doctrine and orthodoxies that continues to billow out of so many mouths that – to me – dishonor-by-way-of-not-even-mentioning much of what I consider to be the most numinous, the most intelligent, the most hopeful and glorious about life on Earth, including our beleaguered human species.

If I’m going to level this ferocious finger-pointing at others’ endless talking, I must bring it to my own contribution. What is my value? What is my contribution? Have I been seduced into imagining I am actually making a contribution? Is this contribution relevant to what is happening right now? It is no longer business-as-usual. In this new and blessed, unimaginable silence, what could I possibly imagine contributing?

The Elder Owl at our fence…

I have not answered this with any sort of ‘period’ – the kind that comes at the end of a sentence to mark the end of a thought. But I have answered it with an experience of embodied knowing. I have answered it with the wisdom of my own heartbreak and longing. I do not want to squander this opportunity to love and lead with courage. To feel heartbroken with courage. And to weave these all-too-familiar experiences into simple actions that honor the fact that I am here, right now, as the world as we know it is dying.

So, after a good deal of silence and wandering…here’s what I know that (I think) is of great value (though I’m not the only one who knows any of this, thankfully). I know we are in an unraveling. From precious myriad biological expressions of Life to our spiritual fabric, our educational system and our alleged democracy…a fierce and carnivorous dying. We are alive at a time of cognitively unfathomable volumes of loss and death. Yet simultaneously, we are (as a culture) asleep in our addiction to technology, entertainment and a pathological fear of discomfort. I know there is no death without birth. This is simply a physiological, ecological fact. I know that, thanks to Western Industrial Culture’s feeble mythology, we are ill-equipped to acknowledge this death/birth from any vantage point let alone one of the embodied perception that comes from an awareness of our belonging and therefore our responsibility.

So, how do we orient? What if we turned our attention toward midwifing the death, and therefore the birth? What if we fine-tuned our devotional work to include – or perhaps even focus on – guiding those people in our communities to be more able to turn towards the dying-and-birthing rather than the erroneous ‘saving’ or the mere ‘surviving’? Many of us are in outrageous luxury: the luxury of being able to worry about our purpose, our place, our value. Where do those of us equipped and inclined, lean into the necessary leadership, required for these times, when our models of leadership are hollow, bankrupt and destructive? Where do we rehydrate our disheveled and dishonored ways of knowing and leading when they (and therefore, we) have been systematically removed from the curated and sterilized halls of knowledge and power?

Well…I can only answer these questions from my own lived/living experience. I have been listening, in the industrial silence, to the cacophony of wisdom all around me. Here, I will continue to hone my quiet voice of guidance and leadership, starting (but not ending) with a spontaneous offering beginning in just a few weeks for women leaders, Weaving In The Dark. Before you imagine this doesn’t mean YOU, please make sure to read my reclaimed definition of ‘Women Leader’. If you’ve made it this far in this essay and you identify as a woman, chances are, you’re it. If you’re a man reading this essay, and you spend time with women, what an incredible offering of support and empowerment to acknowledge them by way of sharing this invitation with them.

With love and rage…