One of my favorite morning rituals is to sit in quiet solitude on my front porch for just 10 to 15 minutes. At times, I get away from this practice, but I find when I make room for it, I am able to face all the awfulness of this world with a steadier heart and mind.
There can be different ways to sit in silence. In many religious traditions, the idea is to quietly pray or read scripture, and there is value in that. At times, I do that too, but for me this silent time is a time to quiet my mind, to let go of all the answers I tell myself, to silence all the many words that bounce around in my brain, and instead to truly listen.
Yet the practice is not exactly to empty my mind either. The mind always has something: the sound of the birds, the breeze caressing my skin, a car driving by. And even while quietly looking at the mountains, the world intrudes. Thoughts of the awful news of the day suddenly fill my mind, and I find myself considering the terrible brokenness and heartbreaking injustice all around me. But as I sit in silence, I pull my mind back to the day, to the present, to the breeze, to the multitudinous choir of birds welcoming the morning, and I reflect that this very practice of pulling my mind back from the larger world into this present moment is a skill. It’s the skill we use when injustice and cruelty anger us, and yet we must master that anger to think clearly about our next step in this world. It’s the same skill we use when beloved things shatter, and we sit with that shatteredness for a time, and then pick ourselves up and keep going.
The great paradox of the spiritual life is that unproductiveness can be our most fertile time. This idea is mirrored in agriculture. When a field is intentionally left uncultivated, we call it letting the field lie fallow. However, a fallow field is not necessarily void of activity unless it has been poisoned in some way. Instead:
- Microbes break down organic matter;
- Worms break up soil;
- Nitrogen, potassium and other minerals are released by decomposing plants, enriching the soil;
- Native “weeds” spring up blanketing the earth, and protecting the soil while life works beneath the surface.
In the same way, this time of silence each day strengthens me as nothing else can. And often I find that this beautiful world around me has things to teach me, if I take time to listen.
So it was this time last year: one morning after sitting in silence for a spell, Craig came out to join me. As we sat chatting, we noticed that a flower bed where we had sowed perennial wildflower seed was now covered with an invasive sort of crabgrass which had sprung up quickly after a few days of rain. Almost without a word, we both moved to the bed and began to pull up the crabgrass – carefully, gingerly, so as not to disturb the young wildflower seedlings coming up. As an invasive, crabgrass does not share the bed with others. It is like the proverbial thorns that choke out the seeds, making them unfruitful.
After we had made some progress, Craig looked up and said, “Maybe this is not effective.”
I too looked up and saw our tiny cleared patch among the whole bed. We had made a very little dent. But then I looked back at our little patch of cleared ground.
“There are wildflowers here, we have made progress,” I said.
The next morning, I again went out and sat in silence, quieting my soul. Without even thinking about it when I got up to go inside, I instead found myself pulling up crabgrass. And again the next day. As I looked at the enormity of the task of helping my little wildflowers, another thought came to me:
This is like the small things I can do in this awful world. The work I do seems so insignificant, and yet, even if I am unable to complete the task, I can save some of the wildflowers.
I wrote most of the above a year ago, shortly after I cleared that little patch. Eventually, I cleared most of that portion of the bed, but the invasive weeds were more tenacious than my ability to keep up with them. It really seemed hopeless. Yet, later in the summer a single wildflower bloomed, and I took this picture.
The wildflower seemed very small in the grand scheme of things, and my labor certainly still felt largely futile. And yet, that one wildflower lifted my spirits every time I saw it. A single bloom amid the weeds.
A year passed. Then, last month over Memorial Day weekend, we attended a family wedding some three hours away. We arrived home tired, and went in the house without looking about much. The next morning I came out to get something from the car, and when I turned around to go back in, I was greeted by my same “hopeless” patch of ground, which had over the weekend burst into bloom, now no longer hopeless, but full of life. It continues to bloom now.
Did my act make a difference or would the wildflowers have bloomed anyway? There is no way to know for sure, but that wasn’t the only place where I planted wildflowers. It was the only place I was able to clear of the invasive crabgrass. And it is where the wildflowers now bloom.
So it is that when we have done what we can, we don’t know the full impact of our work. We only know we have labored in this field, and beauty is now there.
Two millennia ago, a young man who lived in the boondocks of a country far away encouraged his friends to consider the wildflowers that grow in the fields. They don’t strive or strain, they don’t fret or worry, they don’t sweat it, but somehow, like magic, they beautify the earth, they take your breath away with their glory.
What we do feels so small in the grand scheme of life, but our small acts make way for a more beautiful world tomorrow. Never think that your unseen act is insignificant.
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