On the Winter Solstice, the shortest day of the year, the moon and waves are at play.
The tide gets real, real low just before the full moon rises.
Once thunderous, the waves roll sleepily forward and back, tumbling over each other. Like always, the light catches on the water and the sky and the gold flecks in the surf. Little bits of gold hide in plain sight, like proof of holiness or magic.
The tide gets real, real low and the birds come to feast. The quiet in between where the waves once touched and where they are now is a landscape – a sandscape – complete with canyons, streams, and gifts for hungry willets – clams, crabs, muscles, and sand dollars.
Skimmers and gulls splash and bathe in the surf taking advantage of the ocean’s rare gentle mood.
I watch a group of plovers, each the size of a ping-pong ball, feast and sing and run. They live for this time when the waves are calm enough to outrun.
My memory sweeps the sand with the waves. I remember the skimmers swimming and the plovers running and the sand dollar covered and uncovered and covered again.
The quiet in between is wet and the water reflects the light, the clouds, and the sky, and I think (more than once): this is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.
It means something because it is always there yet never there. Hidden yet on display for anyone brave enough to bend over and look.
Finding Gifts in Stillness
Living with a sick body is an opportunity to live within the quiet in between. We are forced to slow down, we are forced to regroup, we are forced to pay attention to the currents of chance and mortality that we would rather ignore.
We are forced to be quiet.
The narrative of modern life is muted for us by the urgent need for survival. A drive to succeed is replaced by a study of pain. Our sick bodies feel unnatural, different, worse, and yet they are what we have always known.
When we quiet our bodies we can quiet our minds. Entering the space of softness and healing that a sick body requires allows us to enter the quiet in between of our own selves. In between our own thoughts, in between our own breath.
With practice, intention, time, we can slow the waves of our own thoughts, emotions, pleasures, and pain. We can truly rest.
Mindfulness is, for me, a survival mechanism. Only when I can separate myself from my pain can I stop blaming and hating myself. Only when I can slow down, close my eyes and peer into the quiet in between my internal waves can I see me.
The part of me that remains unbothered. The part of me that I know will survive this – will survive anything.
The part of me that is still speckled in gold, so unwavering and pure that I know it must be holy.
I like to think that we sick ones, we who are old before our time, are the keepers of this quiet space. Holed up in our beds and sofas, sick in body, we are experts in suffering.
Slowly we can become experts in beauty, too, paying for pearls of wisdom with our uncooperative bodies.
If we can learn to sit next to our pain, slow our human thoughts and fears, maybe we can learn to be okay with the unknowns. Maybe we can learn to explore that quiet in between.
“I don’t like to use the word ‘acceptance’ but I think we can try to be comfortable with what we cannot solve.”
-Pauline Boss