Endlessness
When sleep eludes and meditation is a struggle. In the endlessness
In the arms of the angel
Fly away from here
From this dark cold hotel room
And the endlessness that you fear
You are pulled from the wreckage
Of your silent reverie
You’re in the arms of the angel
May you find some comfort here
Full lyrics here by Sarah McLachlan
Yesterday was a Snow Day here in Southern Ontario for many. It was still a busy day for me at home, catching up on admin, messages, and connecting with friends. Getting out for the daily walk.
It makes sense that sleep was catch as catch can after that. Resigning myself to being awake, I got up and meditated. The word that floated up after that when I opened Substack was endlessness.
The human experience, perhaps, is walking on the thin crust of this tiny planet within the vastness of a universe of which we know almost nothing. Its endlessness is an awe-full reality in the night when sleep has gone, or during a meditation when solitude is the overwhelmingly felt experience.
There are times when I feel the endlessness of it all as a profound comfort, like falling peacefully into the arms of the universe knowing I am always held.
At other times that sense of presence is almost imperceptible.
Returning to Rilke’s First Elegy:
O and the night, the night, when the wind full of worldspace
gnaws at our faces—, for whom won’t the night be there,
desired, softly disappointing, setting hard tasks
for the single heart. It is easier on lovers?
Ah, they only use each other to mask their fates.
You still don’t see? Fling the emptiness in your arms
out into the spaces we breathe; perhaps the birds
will feel the increase of air with more passionate flight.
The First Elegy, Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Edward Snow
The human experience is not to live uninterrupted bliss and presence. Absence is folded into presence, doubt into faith, and terror into serenity.
Solitude and Loneliness
As I ask myself how I feel at this moment, it is solitude more than loneliness, though there is an element of the latter in there.
This PT article speaks to the need for solitude to maintain balance and as a corrective to overwhelm:
Loneliness is a negative state, marked by a sense of isolation. One feels that something is missing. It is possible to be with people and still feel lonely—perhaps the most bitter form of loneliness.
Solitude is the state of being alone without being lonely. It is a positive and constructive state of engagement with oneself. Solitude is desirable, a state of being alone where you provide yourself wonderful and sufficient company.
A bit simplistic perhaps, but it’s a key distinction. I am a social and extraverted person who daily seeks out the company of at least one friend or family member to talk to as well as my husband. Yet I also crave and rely on for my wellness my time spent alone thinking in the night, my morning meditation, this writing time to reflect on whatever is coming up for me, and other times of solitude when I am out walking by myself or just regrouping between phone calls and emails as the day goes on.
Silent Retreat
There is a week-long Silent Retreat planned for May if enough participants register for it. I hope to be able to attend as I have never been on a retreat longer than 48 hours.
Talk about endlessness! Being in silence for days on end can be very confronting to the false self but also has the potential for engendering profound insight and transformation.
Thomas Merton and Cynthia Bourgeault
Thomas Merton was deeply acquainted with silence as a contemplative monastic. He wrote in Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander:
In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world, the world of renunciation and supposed holiness. The whole illusion of a separate holy existence is a dream. . . . This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud. . . . I have the immense joy of being [hu]man, a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate. As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now [that] I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun. . . . Then it was as if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depths of their hearts where neither sin nor desire nor self-knowledge can reach, the core of their reality, the person that each one is in God’s eyes. If only they could see themselves as they really are. If only we could see each other that way all the time.
Quoted in this CAC blog on false and True Self
Merton’s epiphany on Fourth and Walnut was to become a cherished gem lovingly repeated and meditated on by contemplatives ever after.
Cynthia Bourgeault was inspired by it (among other things) when she wrote her book The Corner of Fourth and Nondual:
“Unless [Christianity] is understood to be the most realistic and cosmic of faiths and hopes, nothing has been understood of its ‘mysteries’,” writes Pierre Teilhard de Chardin in the final pages of his masterwork, The Human Phenomenon.[i] By “realistic” he means capable of validation within the real world, not simply as theological glass bead game or an interior landscape of myth and metaphor. By “cosmic” he means coextensive with the actual dimensions of the created order and still fully intelligible and coherent at that scale. That is my assessment as well, and it has set the basic agenda for my theology.
Cynthia described her theological direction, in opposite to those of her generation who had given up on Christianity as irrelevant or needing to be demythologized and scaled down, as providing more space for this ancient faith to flourish through drawing deeply from centuries of contemplative wisdom and exploring a nondual understanding of it.
Where Am I Going With All This?
Honestly, I don’t have a lot of fresh insight at the moment. Just sitting with this feeling of endlessness, not needing it to be anything in particular.
Just listening to the silence and what continues to emerge from it.