Stillness

In a world of noise and haste, I crave the quiet hush of the bush. The stillness of time spent without walls, in the open spaces of nature.

Since I was a little girl walking the valley floor, down along the creek bed where the wild mint grew… I have found my peace in the solitude of creation. Sitting on a log, playing with the lichen and moss growing in the soft damp of the undergrowth, the world slowed down. Watching a willywagtail flit from branch to branch chattering merrily to me with his head cocked on one side, I knew the peace of knowing my place in this world.

My place as a participant in creation, an observer of wonder, a nurturer of all that God made. My place in a world infinitely larger than me. To know and feel my own smallness while marveling at the intricate details and perfection of the cosmos.

To be still. To quiet my own thoughts and hurried plans. This is the beginning. The start of the stillness that I need to hear clearly. To see clearly.

There is a poem that I grew up with that often runs through my mind in the day to day of life. It beckons to me from the past with a reminder to be still.

The poem is by a famous Australian writer named Banjo Paterson. The whole poem called “Clancy of the Overflow”, is wonderful, but a couple of stanzas in particular speak to my point.

In my wild erratic fancy visions come to me of Clancy
   Gone a-droving "down the Cooper" where the western drovers go;
As the stock are slowly stringing, Clancy rides behind them singing,
   For the drover's life has pleasures that the townsfolk never know.


And the bush hath friends to meet him, and their kindly voices greet him
   In the murmur of the breezes and the river on its bars,
And he sees the vision splendid of the sunlit plains extended,
  And at night the wondrous glory of the everlasting stars.

Stanzas 6&7 continue...

And in place of lowing cattle, I can hear the fiendish rattle
   Of the tramways and the buses making hurry down the street,
And the language uninviting of the gutter children fighting,
   Comes fitfully and faintly through the ceaseless tramp of feet.


And the hurrying people daunt me, and their pallid faces haunt me
  As they shoulder one another in their rush and nervous haste,
With their eager eyes and greedy, and their stunted forms and weedy,
   For townsfolk have no time to grow, they have no time to waste.

Yet now years later we are left empty and worn. Ever striving but never arriving. The ‘better’ we seek is illusive, always promising but never delivering. Just out of reach. Perhaps if we just run a little farther, try a little harder, we will find it.

Or perhaps it is the wrong path altogether. To fully live is to be still enough to notice. I’m not speaking of passivity. We must work. There is great pleasure and fulfillment in work. We were made for it and it grows us in ways we cannot understand. I’m not speaking of ease. Hardship and struggle purify and strengthen us as the soft path never can.

But in the midst of the work, before and after the work, we must choose to be still. To quiet our hearts and minds. To watch and wait. To embrace the discomfort that may at first arise in our hearts at this total silence. Stay there a while and breathe. The still small voice of God cannot be heard in the whirlwind and the mayhem. We must choose to step away.

So as I sit here at my laptop with a to do list longer than my arm, sick with the flu and with a household of hungry children to feed and bills to pay and animals to care for… I am choosing to remember the lesson Banjo taught me all those years ago. There will never be enough time. I must choose the time. I must choose to be still. I choose to take time to grow. I welcome the stillness.