The Feeling of Being Alive

The mystery gardener begins to plant things in his carefully prepared mulch beds. On the trees, little buds stick out their green tongues, tasting the air. Daffodils turn their cheerful faces outward, worldward. The next-door neighbor who waves at me through the window when he goes by for his afternoon walks, comes over one morning to talk neighborhood business with my friend.

“You haven’t waved to me,” he says to me when I answer the door.

“I haven’t seen you,” I say, checking my memories of the recent past; maybe I’d been away from my desk or absorbed in a task when he’d gone past.

“I’ve been going to play pickle ball,” he says, relenting, letting me off the hook, “it’s the fastest growing game in the U.S. It’s more fun than walking. I hate walking. I don’t mind climbing a mountain, but walking bores me.”

“Well, I’m glad to know you’re still alive,” I say honestly, but with a sudden twinge that I’d forgotten that he’d had a health scare months before. It’s too late to call my words back—let me remind you of your mortality—still, I do mean them.

It’s something to be alive.

On a morning when pain swells to fill the space of my body and leaches out into the room I’m in, I listen to a meditation in which the teacher reminds me of, “the great gift of waking up again.” Oh yes, I think, I forgot. It is a great gift. Even when being alive isn’t easy.

It’s something to be alive and open to letting the world in. I do this by participating in some online meetings and by tutoring online. Interacting with people, even by screen, pulls me out of myself and gives me a taste of what makes travel so fun for me; that insight into others’ universes, the joy of community, the thrill of new experiences. It’s all too simple to let the world close in, close down and to feel the “resistance that is a small locked room” hold me prisoner, as another meditation teacher says. But all I have to do is turn the key and walk through the door. On that other side is the whole world—the wind against my face, the warmth of the sun against my skin, the expanse of the sky above me, the dreams and hopes that move me forward, and in that world is connection, experience, learning, and fun. I want to refresh the fun.

I want to turn my face outward, worldward once again like the daffodils.

“I’m still alive!” the neighbor shouts from his porch to me where I sit on this porch when he and his wife return from some outing. 

“I’m glad you’re still alive,” I shout back. And I mean it.

The neighbor fiddles with the key in the lock and then he says, “I’m glad you’re still alive too!” 

And there, in the sunshine, on the porch with the hummingbirds claiming territory and chasing each other off, I feel the electric buzz under my skin, the beating of my heart, the tidal pull of my breath, the delight of someone else’s care, the feeling of being alive. What a thing that is.  

In Search of Silence

I go in search of silence. Not silence as in a complete lack of sound, but silence as in the absence of noise made by humankind. The need for it bubbles just under my skin, pressing the hairs up on my arms, agitating the already turbulent waters of my mind.

For the city has started to close in around me. Leaf blowers whine incessantly. Cars and trucks roar by. Alarms sound, horns blare, reverse warnings beep. Neighbors yell. Occasionally, a dog barks. The streets I walk can’t take me far enough away to find the stillness and quiet I’d like.

Wild places, open spaces, locations without the trace of meddling are what I want; the peace of wild things of which the poet Wendell Berry wrote.

Sometimes I feel that I have a greater need for this type of peace than others. Sometimes it feels like a curse.   

One afternoon for my walk, I go to the top of Kelly Butte, the nearest hill in the neighborhood where I’m staying. It has a view of mountains and the Willamette river. But it’s not a place where I can sit in the company of the trees, among the waving blades of grass, or from where I can venture on to explore unknown trails. There’s a parking lot and viewpoint with a railing. There are houses all around. The site is a salve but not a cure. It’s a promise, but not an oath. 

A day or so later, my friend tells me of another park within walking distance of the house.

“It has good views,” she says. 

So, in hope of views and more than that, I huff up another hill and find the pine needled, wood chipped path into the trees. For a moment, as I walk the curve away from the road, I’m embraced by the calm only trees can offer. I let my shoulders drop and I breathe.

The river glints like white glass through the openings between tree trunks and branches. I take the trail around and then clamber up a short incline to the open glade of the park and sit on the bench which, indeed, overlooks a wonderful view of blue-layered mountains, sloping, rolling land, moss covered trees, and grass.

Behind me the wind speaks and the trees translate for it. This is what I’ve wanted. This is what I want. Peace. Silence. Stretching my legs out, I soak it into my skin. It lasts until a train horn interrupts the voice of the wind and the trees and takes over the conversation. The constant hum of highway traffic puts its two cents in. 

The wind moves on and away. I try not to mourn its leaving.

Then I no longer have the park and the view to myself. A woman and her dog arrive and I wonder if I’ve taken her spot on this bench, if I’m encroaching on her park time. If she craves solitude and silence the way that I do. I smile. Is she cursed the way I am? Is she, too, a seeker of views and space with a deep longing for wilderness? Perhaps she’s just giving her dog and herself a brief constitutional and nothing more than that. At any rate, for whatever reason, they make their rounds along the perimeter and soon enough they leave. 

I sit for a while longer in solitude though not in silence and then I get up.

Casting a backward glance at the view, I wander through the drowned-out trees, walk down the hill, and go back to my work.     

A week or so later, when my friend suggests a holiday excursion to the coast, it seems my very soul cries out yes before I can even speak the word. My being yearns for an immensity of nature like the sea. I am homesick for the wilderness. For wildness. For the natural world.

The morning of our adventure, we stop off at the store for picnic lunches and then drive off toward the hopeful openings of blue in the cloud covered sky. 

Once parked and with our bags in hand, the sun warm against skin, we trek over dunes and make our way to the beach. There the wind sings, the ocean breathes in and out, seafoam skips down the sand.

We walk and I let all thoughts flit away like a school of fish in a current.

In this setting, among the dunes, with the sea inching in closer and closer, I’m charged up like a battery that had gotten into the red. 18%. 50%. 68%. 82%. 

My friend collects shells and I wander up and down the sand, taking pictures, observing, gazing off into the distance. 85%.

We head back to the house with the sun setting behind us. 

Refreshed but still not fully charged, I find my silence unexpectedly two days later when my friend is teaching online in the other room. I’ve shut the door between us and put headphones on. I’m listening to meditative music said to help with focus, concentration, and memory. I’ve turned my phone facedown, closed my laptop, and opened a book.

To my delight, I get lost in that magical place between worlds, between words where there’s space like silence.

It’s a silence where ideas, someone else’s ideas can blend with my own, contrast against them, knock together, and spin off in their own direction. A space where I can hear myself think. 

“Real reading demands space,” the book says. “Reading, after all, is an act of resistance in a landscape of distraction, a matter of engagement in a society that seems to want nothing more than for us to disengage. It connects us at the deepest levels; it is slow, rather than fast.”

It’s the dialing down of distraction that I’ve so desperately been wanting. It’s the connection to the deep, the tapping into the slow, the descent from frantic to stillness that I’ve been missing and that being outside can facilitate and which can also be found between and within words. In this moment, I have it even amid the noise all around me.   

When I get to the last paragraph of the book, I find the lines that my heart has been trying to beat out. “It is in this way that reading becomes an act of meditation, with all of meditation’s attendant difficulties and grace. I sit down. I try to make a place for silence. It’s harder than it used to be, but still, I read.”  

Still, I read. Still, I go out in search of the quiet places. Still, I have a chasmic need for silence. 

To find stillness wherever one happens to be is a gift. To find wildness and wilderness through engagement and connection to what’s available is also a gift. But being in the wilderness, being among the wild, with the untamed forces of the sea, the calling peaks of mountains, or the open invitation of an unexplored path is a joy almost too full for words. So, still, I seek it every day. Still, I try to make a place for it. Still, I sit. Still.

 

  

*From The Lost Art of Reading by David L. Ulin. The passages quoted are from ebook pages 56 and 99.