“The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.
Don’t go back to sleep”.
~ Rumi
Poet David Whyte once wrote that silence is different to stillness. Silence can be deafening. Stillness is peace. Helping cultivate as sense of inner stillness is central to ToTheInvisible and a life of calm confidence.
April 2020: East Sussex, by the sea.
As I open my eyes this morning, through the open blinds in the bedroom that look to the sea. I can sense the immense out-stretched stillness that covers it completely. I catch the last breath of hazy pink and blue on the horizon. The kind of colours I didn’t know could happen in UK Springtime (I probably don’t even associate it with the UK at all). Maybe because I have never been up early enough or been staring in the right direction. The colours don’t appear in the direction of the sunrise; you have to look on the other side: I hadn’t known to look there.
There’s a moment, just before the last line of pink, peach, then crystal blue, disappears from the horizon that the water looks silken, dark and deep – still.
As the sun rises and starts to hit the surface of the water the whole quality of how you see the sea changes. In the exact same spot, what was deep and impenetrable appears rough and shallower as all the bumps and bubbles in the surface of the water start to appear. What had been lusciously dark and smooth is revealed through the rising angle of the first morning sun to be mottled, undulating and messy. You can suddenly see the angles of the wind more clearly, and how un-uniform all the ripples on the surface of the water are. I do nothing in that moment, as I’ve got up to peer out of the window, but Notice.
You move slowly in stillness like this: when time eases down. You quieten inside. Even the seagulls seem silent outside. Just one solitary crow soars past the window announcing its presence as it heads to towards the cliffs.
Everyday I attempt to retrain myself to feel the stillness of that waking moment: to remember what it feels like and stay in it as long as possible.
The moment I open my eyes, the pull of the world draws me in like a vacuum. Everyday I have to remember in time and yelp ‘wait’ at my brain.
I scan my body and search for the residue of settledness that’s still buried within it from the night’s sleep. I search for a sense of it: the place where my talking personality isn’t. I can usually locate it just above the bottom of my spine, or in my toes … or just around my shoulders like a mist.
That moment is so fragile. It shatters as soon as you pierce it with too much intention. The trick is to just lie there, let the thoughts go (they get quieter over time) and notice. Feel.
It often takes me a moment to resettle there.
Sometimes maybe the night’s sleep hasn’t been so peaceful. It’s here we notice that almost imperceptibly we’re starting the day bringing something else with us. Take a moment to settle, to acknowledge what’s there and to search for a grain of stillness.
Resist the urge to pick up the phone and check all the messages; try not welcome in the day with a scroll of the screen and other peoples waking dreams. I remind myself most days too, but I’m getting better. I usually manage to hold back.
“in that first hardly noticed moment in which you wake there small opening into the new day that closes the moment you begin your plans” – David Whyte, What to remember on waking
In What To Remember on Waking, David Whyte talks of this ‘first hardly noticed moment in which you wake’ as the ‘small opening into the new day that closes the moment you begin your plans’.
“The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.
Don’t go back to sleep.
You must ask for what you really want.
Don’t go back to sleep.
People are going back and forth across the doorsill
where the two worlds touch.
The door is round and open.
Don’t go back to sleep”.
Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks, Essential Rumi
How often are we asleep when we’re awake. Asleep at the wheel of the day. How little we live of life truly awake, alert and alive to what’s happening within and around us. That’s what Rumi is begging us not to do when he’s cries ‘don’t go back to sleep’.
A world of the brain and bus-i-ness. A world of stillness and Being, buried in the body and past its sensations. Both are present in any moment.
Sometimes using your imagination helps. I can imagine the doorsill between these two world touching worlds: like a portal from a TV show. Something round and fathomable and touchable. For me, that was the feeing I had when I first found it- like a window or a door – and over time, when I got used to feeling it, it became less of a door a more of a mist. The mist emerged when I didn’t let the door shrink away from me or try so hard to grasp it.
And so it will be for you as you learn to cultivate a new kind of present moment awareness.
If, each morning or during the day, you can spend some moments sensing that stillness. Noticing it beneath all that is happening in your body.
Stepping in and out of this door, you will become aware that it’s less of a door and more of a veil. They aren’t two separate worlds. They both exist at the same time, it’s just that we lose our ability to see when we wake- or we see differently: much the way ocean’s appearance changed as the sun started to rise.
≡ This is an excerpt from PAUSE, a 30 day journey into deeper awareness from ToTheInvisible ≡
