Sylvia's Journal

At Quaker Meeting the idea is to still your mind. I couldn’t for the life of me. It was as if my mind had a life of its own, resisting all attempts to be quiet. I practiced the advice from my meditation tapes and focused on my breathing. But my mind would invent stories, project images that triggered stories and endless to do lists. And when I kept returning to my breathing it tried to intervene physically by making me hot, then tired and then uncomfortable in whatever position I was sitting. While at a cosmic level I was ready to be ‘one with the universe and listen for God’s voice,’ at a cellular level this was being thwarted with a stubbornness that surprised me. Maybe what I was experiencing was the prototype of all good and evil battles that have plagued mankind, at its most personal manifestation.

Axel stood up and spoke about compassion, and so I tried that angle for awhile, being compassionate with that frantic and busy part of myself that cannot rest – but I found it was only feeding it, making it more active, as if I was stroking the ego of, well ehh…, my own ego. When the hour was over I realized that my travel and rather hectic life has been undermining my ability to live in the here and now and surrender to a more quiet rhythm in life’s complex score. I am always anticipating, thinking about what needs to be done next, learned, fixed, gathered, followed up, written, packed, acquired, understood or activated. But there is nothing in there about slowing down, closing or silencing.

I bicycled back from Meeting while Axel passed me by in the car. We arrived home at about the same time, had another fishy meal in the absence of Tessa and Steve, and then drove to Salem’s visitor center. Our friend Merrill who is a story teller for the National Park Service, was on stage to tell stories about the underground railway in Essex County. It was a superb performance that has lessons and morals that are just as valid today as they were then, and once again, it was all about compassion. And I realized that the morning’s experience in Quaker Meeting had reminded me that compassion and being hurried cancel each other out. This was confirmed, I learned later from a video on TED about the same topic, by a group of seminary students who were asked to do a sermon about the Good Samaritan. As they hurried from their class to the church, preoccupied with their performance, most did not notice or pay attention to the man doubled over in pain who was sitting in their path to the church.