Take the word...stillness…and what do you envision?
During these unwritten chapters fed by fall, stillness is found floating gently beside a yellowish, red and brown leaf waiting to kiss the shore of a new found land to which it will help feed. Stillness smiles upon the un-harnessed corners of a black and white calf located three steps from its mother who constantly nags in a mooing way that winter is coming closer everyday.
Enormous amounts of humans run from stillness. It invites fear into the unknown while stealing air from what already is. Stillness to some is a calming of the inner core created by sheltered avenues of inspiration and influence painting what becomes the portrait you see each morning in the mirror only to fuzz up the storybook with sharp jabs of judgment.
“Stillness is a language while all other things are a bad translation,” says author and spiritual guru Eckhart Tolle.
I love to touch the soft edges of an unexpected catnap. For a brief moment, you’re no longer in control which makes dreaming more colorful and unforgettably empowering. To slowly wake from such a tiny escape connects you to an object that is formless and timeless, a dimension within a self few learn to recognize. We elect instead to cover its face with IPod's, cell phone conversations, out of control shopping habits and eating adventures aimed at pleasing anything, everything and all things not associated with the silences of being.
We see the eyes, the fading shapes of a chin that once stood for something, arms that were once rounded and a rear thats become every shape but round. Quickly turning away, stillness becomes a once loved favorite song carefully placed in a cardboard box then hidden in an attic you visit only during holidays or the loss of something that once stood for unconditional love and protection.
Life exists beyond the ego…its called stillness.
Runners reach it while pacing their life and style through neighborhoods or open fields of no place but inward to go. I locate stillness while creating, be it writing at sunrise, producing radio commercials people instantly tune out of or raking leaves on the front lawn into a pile resembling the skyscraping snowcapped peaks connected to the mountains of Montana.
Stillness has no form…thought does.
To sit down and write to write puts form into what’s been written. To put pen to paper and perform what Julia Cameron calls painting a room allows your senses to become the room inviting incredible amounts of stillness to breathe on the pages that arrive without explanation.
I call stillness a white out. Friends and family label it distance—a pulling away when in fact I’ve gone no where but inside, for a moment, a brief period of something that an artist, chef, baker or traveler can never locate the right words to describe because doing so becomes the birth of form which goes against the waves that identify stillness as being a simple place and or safe escape.
Allow your form to dissolve. Rather than chase dreams, catch what can’t see, arrive expecting nothing only to learn in that single moment you shall be inspired.
Stillness…the art of steal art from the sky.
arroecollins@clearchannel.com
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