I've been taking a class this summer at a local college. One day, when I arrived for class, I found it had been cancelled - and suddenly two hours were mine that I hadn't had before. I spent a little time at the library going through periodicals I never get a chance to see, and then walked over to the chapel.
Being a person of no religious faith never stops me from visiting churches. I like churches because they are one of the last places where a person can find quiet in unminted abundance. I sat myself in one of the pews -- and just sat. I was the only person there. I didn't bother to think or muse, didn't bother to figure out or plan; I just sat in the comfortable silence resident in that vaulted and dusky space.
It's an odd experience to be quiet, to be just quiet and nothing else. Away from the thousand truces that give an edge to getting along I could hear myself breathe. Have you heard yourself breathe lately? Have you felt yourself breathe lately? A splendid soothing action, this gentle bellows, this lithe accordion. To hear the precise inhale, the languorous exhale, to feel the ribs pulse, the shoulders lift and fall, to know the jointed rhythm of a body breathing full and even - all this is to be suddenly conscious of what you take for granted, to know the ordinary by being forced out of the routine. The wonders of the world lie in such unplanned quiet eruptions of notice.
So I sat and breathed, inspired, for the moment in a delicate aside from time. Four nuns came in for prayer, three in white, one in black; two janitors came through kicking up the kneelers left down from that morning's mass. Occasionally there were creaks and crinches from the building itself - the expansion or contraction of a pane of glass, one brick settling against another, as if the building breathed as well, using air borrowed from whispered responses or susurrations of faith. But soon it was time to go, back to the indenture of the world, out to its dice and splendor.
Transcendental Meditation followers used to say that if you were too busy to meditate, you were too busy. Thoreau said the same thing in a different way: "Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life?" I would like to think that such occasional silences might provide answers, that such respites could occasionally offer truths. But I also suspect that there is just breathing, and that breathing may be the only truth we have because when it stops, truth stops as well. We can breathe full, we can breathe shallow, we can modulate it or ignore it - but we can't avoid it. We need to figure out what makes us breathe the best, and then breathe as if our lives depended on it.
Graduations
Friendleaving