The Art of Stillness

“If I ever go looking for my heart’s desire again, I won’t look any further than my own backyard. Because if it isn’t there, I never really lost it to begin with.” Dorothy, The Wizard of Oz 

“To me, the point of sitting still is that it helps you see through the very idea of pushing forward; indeed, it strips you of yourself, as of a coat of armor, by leading you into a place where you’re defined by something larger.”

“talking about stillness is really a way of talking about clarity and sanity and the joys that endure.”

“You don’t get over the shadows inside you simply by walking away from them.”

“Buddhists explain the nature of our mind: there may be clouds passing across it, but that doesn’t mean a blue sky isn’t always there behind the obfuscations. All you need is the patience to sit still until the blue shows up again.”

“So much of our lives takes place in our heads – in memory or imagination, in speculation or interpretation – that sometimes I feel that I can best change my life by changing the way I look at it.”

“This is what the principle of the Sabbath enshrines. It is, as Abraham Joshua Heschel, the great Jewish theologian of the last century, had it, ‘a cathedral in time rather than in space’; the one day a week we take off becomes a vast empty space through which we can wander, without agenda, as through the light-filled passageways of Notre Dame.”

“The point of gathering stillness is not to enrich the sanctuary or mountaintop but to bring that calm into the motion, the commotion of the world.”

“In an age of speed, I began to think, nothing could be more invigorating than going slow. In an age of distraction, nothing can feel more luxurious than paying attention. And in an age of constant movement, nothing is more urgent than sitting still.”

Quotes from The Art of Stillness: Adventures in Going Nowhere by Pico Iyer

Photos of Abkhazi Garden, Victoria, BC

Walking

"How can you explain that you need to know that the trees are still there, and the hills and the sky? Anyone knows they are. How can you say it is time your pulse responded to another rhythm, the rhythm of the day and the season instead of the hour and the minute? No, you cannot explain. So you walk."

Author unknown, from New York Times editorial, The Walk, 25 October 1967

Not Having What We Want, But Wanting What We Have

“Gnarled sweet potatoes, tips curling like the feet of witches. Hubbard squashes, big enough to sit on, warty, blue. Mushrooms flaring their gills. Back in July, the tomatoes and corn the farmers offered were cheery, Crayola-bright. October is scary: it holds every child’s most despised vegetable in its wrinkled claw. . . .

“The vegetables of summer are easy to love, as it is easy to find young men and women beautiful, to promise commitment before it has been tested, to be happy beneath a cloudless sky. I’m still not sure it’s natural to prefer what’s difficult and unwieldy, to feel affection warts-and-all. But the world is older and slower and more patient than we ever will be.

"These vegetables keep, and have helped every generation before ours survive long winters. They are part of the great practice of not having what we want, but wanting what we have, and after years of trying – of trying and trying – my husband and I have both come to love, even crave, beets and butternut squash, the hard vegetables of fall. We appreciate their complexity. We find them very good.”

(Katrina Vandenberg, Orion magazine)

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