Present Over Perfect

unlikeliest of places to find the healing we’ve been
searching for all along. Why am I a writer, of all possible
things? I hate silence, stillness, introspection. When’s lunch?
My lifelong love affair with stories and words has
brought me to stillness, proving once again that God has
both a sense of humor and a sense of outrageous grace.
The word stillness, of course, brings me to Eliot, with
whom I fell in love as a young reader, many years ago.
The only way through the emptiness is stillness: staring
at that deep wound unflinchingly. You can’t outrun
anything. I’ve tried. All you can do is show up in the
stillness.
And the grounding, the healing: I’m finding that it
happens in silence. I don’t want this to be true. I want there
to be silence people and noise people, and God mostly
reveals himself to me at parties and while I’m watching TV
and reading and the music’s playing really loud.
I feel sometimes like the last extrovert on earth, the last
girl on the dance floor, the last person to finally own up to
the fact that true silence can’t be avoided if you want to be a
truly connected spiritual person. I’ve basically spent all my
life avoiding true silence.
But it’s in the silence that you can finally allow yourself
to be seen, and it’s in the being seen that healing and
groundedness can begin.
When I practice silence just for a few minutes, when I
practice allowing myself to be seen and loved by the God
who created me from dust, I start to carry an inner stillness