Time of Disconnection

It’s a lovely cool morning. Autumn is on its way. The intense heat of the summer has temporarily released us from its grip. I am relieved and slightly disoriented.

The neighborhood is quiet. No cars on Pleasant Street. The sound of the Temple garden waterfall floats over the always distant rumble of the highway several miles off. I know it’s quiet when I hear the highway—the pulsing artery of commerce that keeps our consumer culture in business.   Silence, as John Cage taught us, is just the space in which noise appears.

Or we could also say that there is no silence. Always some subtle sounds of the breath moving in and out, the heart beating. Once, in the hospital, they checked to see if my carotid artery was functioning properly. Putting a listening device on the side of my neck that recorded and amplified the sound, the technician and I heard the great pulsating rushing—the sound of the blood rushing from my heart up toward the tender regions of my brain. She was rather neutral about the whole affair, but I was greatly excited to hear the roaring streams alive in my body.

I had an uncomfortable day yesterday. In the morning, I wrote and wrote and nothing held together. One thing came after the other and I couldn’t find any pattern or shape that felt right. I would either lose the thread or would find myself working hard to write something that was of little interest to me.

Most of my day was like that—a feeling a subtle and pervasive sense of disconnection. Even watering the plants and wandering in the garden didn’t help. The roots of my self felt parched and unable to connect to any nourishment. Still alive but held in solitary confinement by invisible forces. There were no walls or bars. The door was not locked. But I could neither find it nor open it.

Some states of mind are difficult to see clearly. Sometimes the light of awareness is diffuse and unable to focus. Like a day on the coast of Maine where the morning fog refuses to lift and one has no choice about clarity of vision. Of course, the trick is always to appreciate where we are, but sometimes this appreciation is nowhere to be found. I did my best to settle in to the place I was, but it was not comfortable. I really don’t like this particular feeling of powerlessness and disconnection. In the end, I just lived with it.

Patience is one of the qualities of mind that Buddhist call the Paramitas – the Perfections. These qualities are both the path to awakening and the result of awakening. (The traditional six Mahayana Paramitas are: generosity, discipline, patience, energy, absorption and wisdom.) Yesterday, having tried everything else, I opted for practicing patience.

Sometimes there is nothing that can be done. We can either rest where we are or we can keep trying to be somewhere else. Or, more accurately, we try some alternating combination of the two. I recommend doing something if you can and not doing something if you can’t.

Eventually—and sometimes eventually feels like a long, long time—things change. Difficult states ease and new possibilities emerge. The glue of things begins to hold again and the water somehow reaches my parched roots. Metaphors are plentiful and I once again begin using them indiscriminately.

For this, I am grateful.