Returning to the Great Stillness

My new dachshund puppy is teaching me a lot about silence. Not that she's silent. Anything but. But I live in a rural area about an hour from Boston. There are at least six horse farms in the area, and a quintessential new England common with three white steepled churches that was once filmed in a movie to provide the backdrop for....well, a quintessential New England common. By most standards it would qualify as rural or quasi-rural. But as it turns out little black and tan Maggie is super-sensitive to noises and if she's out in the yard and hears a plane or a leaf blower, she freaks. This has in turn made me more sensitive to the noises she hears and has been a bit of a revelation. What surprises me is how much of it I hear in this supposedly rural realm. I call this ambient background noise that we are all immersed in The Great Noise. Some may want to include the ever present media barrage as a part of this as well.

I'm not sure exactly why there is so much noise in our lives these days. When did this happen? It seems to be a product of the hyper-accelerated times we're now living in and the tendency in our culture to engage in the business of busyness. Certainly fostering a 24/7 world has fostered the elimination of many sacred spaces in our lives or even just time to pause, reflect, or appreciate. But as the Shift progresses, the transparency of all this busyness which has become the ambient white noise of our lives becomes more obvious. We may be called to find what poet T.S. Eliot called the "still center of the turning world" and one of my own teachers, Taoist master Bruce Frantzis, calls the "great stillness". This is not just a personal endeavor however. Our society and culture also needs to return to the special places and spaces that marked a time for spirit to renew and soul to reconnect. In time I believe this will happen but in a pluralistic society such as ours, it becomes a more complicated process. In finding that sweet spot of stillness, we can remember who we are and what we are called to do in this special time.