Grace Motherfucker! —Do You Speak It?
The Inimitable Power of Silence, Stillness, Solitude and Rest.
To the restless heart, even the sky is full of chains.
We never plant a seed in the soil and then poke sharp sticks at it to coax it out into the light—we have to trust to nature, that the secret magic of life takes the time that it takes. This patience, and the way that nature is doing something invisible and magical below the surface while we wait, is Grace.
You will never have true power over any aspect of your life until you have power over the tides and seasons in a moment and the tides and seasons in yourself.
It is a broken idea that all the spaces need to be filled with something.
Even our projects of meditation and mindfulness can be done procedurally—to do the thing, to get the feeling. We can go for a hike in nature, and pay more attention to the steps we count, and the postcard prettiness, than to the invitation to presence of such moments.
We fill our time with distraction and busyness. We fill our stomachs with food that isn’t medicine. We fill our darkness with cheap light. We fill our silences with chatter and noise. We fill our solitude with spiritual junkfood.
All our forms of emergence are born out of emergency, and all our urges, from urgency. Impatience is a lived belief in scarcity.
All because our minds are so busy—so overwhelmed. We never get taught the power of Grace. Grace is not the hand of an angel or sweet music from heaven, it is the spacing of time when it listens out for the depth of our sincerity.
There are moments unfolding constantly, inside us and around us, all the time. The opportunity to show love and hold space is always present. The greater invitation is to ask ourselves: “What does love look like right now?”, the answer isn’t always the same, but grace is always an appropriate response. Love’s other name is Understanding. We may always know when it is that real understanding has arrived; It is not about what you know, least of all about what you want to ensure others now know that you know, nor is it about anything you can explain. It is simply, and only, once Grace has arrived. Holding space is less about doing, and more about being. It is less about injecting words into the moment and more about presence.
Grace is the moment of peace carved from the middle of an unfolding drama. It is choosing silence as an answer to noise. It is fasting at times, for no other reason than to show gratitude and appreciation to a system that works tirelessly and can become fatigued just by doing its job.
Grace is Rest. And in the many ways that we are unmade by our life circumstances and brought to ground again, forced to shed the vibrant leaves of who we were yesterday, to return back to the roots of ourselves, to grieve and to let go for a turn, that reprieve we call a kind of death, is in fact the greatest form of Grace.
Stillness in all the chaotic movement and change, is Grace.
-Kindness to yourself when you have failed.
-Patience with life, when the road disappears and your plans unravel.
-Solitude, when you realise that you are no longer good company, least of all to yourself.
These, are Grace, and it is in grace that we encounter the courage to make room again for wonder and pure imagination, believing again, that our lives are happening for us, and that we belong, and that everything again might have Meaning.
Fasting, stillness, quietude, patience, solitude and rest—these are the languages of Grace we need to become fluent in.
Rest is a necessary part of growth. Silence is a necessary part of any real conversation, and death, is a necessary part of a full life.
GRACE
The green tree
surrenders its proud verdancy
to autumn,
and then at last,
to even the utter undoing
of winter,
one leaf at a time.
And in good time,
re-emerges,
to speak its shy proclamation
one delicate,
timid bloom
at a time.
Over seasons,
it endures even the loss of limbs
to be sculpted, lovingly
by time,
into the perfectly imperfect fullness
of its own emergent self.
Grace,
is nothing more
than the trusting
of our dearest cares to nature,
and the gentle unfolding
of time.
—Rocco Jarman