Then, a friend of mine said she was going on a nine day silent retreat. I felt a little envious. Nine days of silence. How would that be for me?
Well, the universe is helping me find out. I have a whopper of a flu, and have been confined to home with a fever, cough, cold, aches, pains, and it's difficult to talk. Thus, my world for four days has been deeply silent. At first, I mainly slept wrapped in blankets and sweat, and then, yesterday I emerged a bit, and today, I thought this is it, so I'm puttering about, going through piles of papers and things, and dealing with what comes our way in the modern world, which today has required some mobilization of vocal cords, and understanding and patience on the receiver's end, so information could transfer and my Fastrak pass could renew. Of course if I could have remembered my user name, password and code I could have done it on-line, but amidst my many passwords and codes one for Fastrak did not appear to exist.
I sit here now, considering the gift of this. I'm plowing through the pile of magazines I've been waiting to get to. Of course one doesn't read or write at a silent retreat, so I'm not playing by the rules, but, even so, I'm starting to get antsy.
I am with the words of Miles Davis who said about music that it “is not to play all the notes you could play, but to wait, hesitate and let space become part of the configuration.”
The flu is giving me time to "let space become part of the configuration". I'm trying to see my brain as a constellation and I re-arrange the stars, so pain can release and slip on through.
Not very successful so far but who knows what the next moment brings.
Recently I read Healing Lazarus by Lewis Richmond, an amazing book, though probably not for everyone. It is of one man's struggle with illness, and how he comes to see that some of his response relates to his mother's death when he was four. We are each handed a great deal to sort through individually, and then, there is the world situation, which feels a little precarious right now. How do we filter both personally and universally our place in the world?