Love Note #10: To Be Nothing, To Be No One.

Dear Heart,

This season inspires a contemplation of silence—not just the absence of sound, but the stillness that is so still, that quiet that is so quiet, that nothing moves or sounds or asserts itself, or creates or destroys. It's a no-thing, a nothing, yet paradoxically the very source from which all life springs.

When I was young, I put a small mirror up to the large bathroom wall mirror, trying to glimpse what nothing looked like. Curious about that nothing, I would dive backwards in the swimming pool, circling in the water until my belly touched the bottom. There I would let all the air out of my lungs and find a weightless moment where everything stopped. I wanted to know absolute zero. And there still, the heart beats. Still, the clock ticks. Still, the planets revolve.

Beneath and within all of the heart beating, the clock ticking, the planets revolving, lives this silence, the dimensionless dimension, constantly present like our shadow, coexisting with our stubbornly distracted and frenetic world. The heart of being, our true source, silently calls us home to zero—to rest in its effulgent stillness and drink of its limitless love.

In our culture, we're taught to orient ourselves largely through the mind, to keep ourselves moving toward somewhere "good"—not here, not now, but down the road. Hurry up! That unsettled creature in us—driving the doing, the becoming, the creating—doesn't know there's such a thing as stillness, as empty mind, as death walking. And I say that with such joy! To be nothing, to be no one, to be given over to this eternal moment without a thought to any before or any after, fully turning around to this now and embracing it till we are extinguished!

As you sit in meditation, there are two places that invite rest—at the top of the breath as you breathe in, and at the bottom as you breathe out. Like being on a swing when your feet touch the sky, there's a pregnant moment before descent. That gap is found between waves, in the swing of the pendulum of a clock, in day turning to night. In these spaces between, we might enter into what cannot be spoken. Every word, in a way, is a thing, and all we can do is point to this. It's in these thresholds, these holy pauses, where time itself dissolves that we might taste the eternal that lives within the moment—that sacred space where the maypole ribbons dance around the silent center of the Beloved's great, limitless, bottomless heart.

My invitation to you is to lay your bones down here, to lay your weary heart down in that great spacious benevolent quiet, even while things move, even while the heart beats, even while the lungs breathe. To let the earth hold your bodies as you give everything over in love, in worship, or even in exhaustion, to what has no thing. Here lives a dark that is shot through with light, where opposites embrace in a way the mind cannot grasp. Out of this great silence, worlds are created. Into this great silence, all dissolves. Every moment, a rebirth.

Now is a chance to pause at the threshold of the new year, to sink into the fertile emptiness where all begins anew, and to let life show us what's next—one breath, one moment, at a time.

Whispering to your silent center,

Jeannie

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