Cassidy Hall Art, podcast, solitude, Writing

Spark My Muse Interviews Cassidy Hall

Today I had the honor of being on the Spark My Muse podcast with host, Lisa Colón DeLay. We talked about what it means to tend the fire within, the place of infinite possibility within each of us. The space we must protect, guard, feed, and learn to share in a way that offers love and creativity to the world––as opposed to violence or destruction. 

Later in the interview Lisa asks about my pilgrimage to the seventeen Trappist/Cistercian monasteries of the United States, my current role as a seminarian at CTS pursuing ordination, my thoughts on the need for more voices/faces in the contemplative world, and my thoughts on being a queer woman in these various spaces.

“Those drawn to the contemplative path… We are the feelers. We feel everything. We feel the whole world… It’s a good home for the sensitive, at least for me.”

Cassidy Hall, Spark My Muse

Listen on the Spark My Muse website here.

“…frustration is due precisely to the incapacity for positive, constructive, creative activity. Creation in this sense is then nothing else but frustration failing to express itself freely and normally, calling desperately for help in a way that fails to be heard or understood…When everything is creative, nothing is creative. When nothing is creative, everything tends to be destructive, or at least to invite destruction. Our creativity is in great measure simply the expression of our destructiveness, the guarded, despairing admission of destructiveness that cries for help without admitting it. The only positive thing left in our destructiveness is its bitter anguish. This, at least, can claim to be. This has creative possibilities.”

Thomas Merton, Theology of Creativity

 

“Poetry is a life-cherishing force. For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry.”

Mary Oliver, A Poetry Handbook

 

“First, silence makes us pilgrims. Secondly, silence guards the fire within. Thirdly, silence teaches us to speak.”

Henri Nouwen, The Way of the Heart 

 

“…There may be a great fire in our soul, but no one ever comes to warm himself by it, all that passers-by can see is a little smoke coming out of the chimney, and they walk on.

All right, then, what is to be done, should one tend that inward fire, turn to oneself for strength, wait patiently – yet with how much impatience! – wait, I say, for the moment when someone who wants to comes and sits down beside one’s fire and perhaps stays on? Let him who believes in God await the moment that will sooner or later arrive.

Letter from Vincent van Gogh tohis younger brother Theo van Gogh, July 1880 at the age of 27

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Cassidy Hall Uncategorized

Carl McColman Interviews Cassidy Hall

Read the full interview on Patheos here.

How did you get inspired to create a film about Thomas Merton and his hermitage?

“We live in an age where men manufacture their own truth.” — Thomas Merton, Sermon on The Feast of the Immaculate Conception (Recorded 12/8/1962)

Even aside from politics, our days host an array of their own problems. Many have viewed the life of a monk or hermit to be a departure from the world and its many problems. But I’ve come to see this going away from the world as a way to love it—and its humans—more deeply.

I began reading Thomas Merton’s New Seeds of Contemplation sometime back in 2011. This evolved into a Gethsemani Abbey pilgrimage which led to me traveling to the seventeen Trappist/Cistercian monasteries of the US to talk to monks and nuns about silence, solitude, and contemplative life. Somewhere along the way I became more and more interested in Thomas Merton’s work and hermitage years—why would such a brilliant person who has so much to offer the world go away from the world. The joke was on me until I began to read further into his desires for solitude and how this tension and paradox was another way of expression, another way of showing solidarity with the suffering of the world. 

There’s a tension in the contemplative life—a tension that holds a paradox. This tension is intertwined with the pain of the world while meeting said pain in the silence and solitudes of our everyday lives (a paradox to many). This doesn’t make sense to everyone and the contemplative path is certainly not for everyone, but I do sincerely believe aspects of it can benefit the whole world. 

Day of a Stranger is a title taken from one of Thomas Merton’s most beloved essays (May 1965). The essay was published in Latin America as a response to a journalist’s question about what a typical day in the life was like for Merton in his new hermitage home. Unbeknownst to Merton or the journalist that this would be his final home and “Dia de un Extrano,” (Day of a Stranger) was published in Papeles, a journal from Caracas, Venezuela in July of 1966 (also published in The Hudson Review in the summer of 1967).

Other questions answered:

What has surprised you the most about listening to Merton’s old tape recordings?

You were a co-producer of In Pursuit of Silence. How did working on that film help to shape your creative process for Day of a Stranger?

Why, a half century after he died, does Thomas Merton remain so popular? What do you think is at the heart of his appeal?

Read the full interview on Patheos here.

 

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Cassidy Hall Art, busy, Creativity, death, dying, Uncategorized

Notes on Silence… is here!

IMG_4104.jpgMany of you know I’ve been working on co-authoring a book with Patrick Shen. We lovingly titled the work Notes on Silence based on our extensive deep-dive into studying silence over the last four years. It includes nearly 300 pages of original essays, images, quotes, notes, and transcripts from the silence experts featured in the documentary film, In Pursuit of Silence (including but not limited to Pico Iyer (author of The Art of Stillness), Maggie Ross (author of Silence: A Users Guide 1 & 2), Julian Treasure (CEO, The Sound Agency), Helen Lees (Author of Silence in Schools), and many more. Patrick and I discuss encounters with silence in spaces like Thomas Merton’s hermitage and an anechoic chamber in Minnesota (Orfield Labs, named the quietest place on earth by Guinness Book of World Records), we expand on the dualistic nature of silence and sound, we examine religions and spiritual notations of silence, and offer numerous personal notes on our individual observations of and moments with silence.

THE BOOK IS HERE and we’ll be shipping out our first run of only 200 books this Wednesday, April 18th, 2018. Patrick and I will be signing all of the first edition copies which you can order here. If you’d like to learn more about the book, you can listen to our recent interview on the Encountering Silence Podcast.
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Incredibly grateful for this generous endorsement from author Carl McColman:

“Notes on Silence is a treasure. Cassidy Hall and Patrick Shen bring a poet’s heart and an artist’s eye to the ineffable, wondrous mystery of silence, and in doing so they have created a book that invites you by multiple passageways to the hidden place where mysticism, beauty and emptiness dance. Their reflections, combined with striking photography and interviews with over a dozen silence lovers, make for a thoughtful celebration of its essential subject. It’s more than just a companion volume to their vitally important documentary In Pursuit of Silence — it’s a luminous work in its own right.”

NotesOnSilenceBook-Cover-EPUB.jpg

(A brief side note about the significance of the cover: The top and bottom images featured are photos by Patrick and I from The Redwoods Monastery and a forest in Taiwan. It wasn’t until later that we realized this wasa lovely representation of the book’s contents: East and West… The vastness of expressions and ideas gathering together in the peaceful images of trees… The inexpressible vastness and beauty of silence.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Cassidy Hall Art, busy, Creativity, pilgrim, podcast, solitude, Writing

The Uncertainty of Silence

(This will be among the many essays featured in the forthcoming book Notes on Silence that I’m co-authoring with Patrick Shen which can be purchased here.)

“…I want to be with those who know secret things
or else alone…” Rainer Maria Rilke

I was around 8 years old when I began to have reoccurring dreams about death. With a rush of adrenaline, shocked and relieved to be alive, I’d wake up only remembering I was dead and floating in a white sky-scape of silence. I was alone, lost, and stagnant in limitless space and eternal time. This dream doesn’t sound grim to me anymore, but at 8 this nothingness had me sprinting to my parent’s bed. These dreams created in me a reverence for mystery and a deep longing to know the unknowable, to hold the ungraspable, and to forever chase what can never be met. 

We live in a world that loves to know. We like to intellectualize things, name people, describe experiences, and we covet our ability to share tangible evidence of these ungraspable things. Metaphors, on the other hand, hold meaning for the nameless. Metaphors help us to make sense of the unknowable things. We spend our lives clothing the many mysteries we encounter with metaphors which may not otherwise have any meaning. 

Defining is an interesting tool. It can be both harmful and helpful. We often use names to remain in control. We control our environment by regulating it, containing it, qualifying it. Most often names are used to define in order to make the definer feel more comfortable. Having a sense of knowing or grasping more creates comfort, and comfort makes us feel in control. Yet, I can’t help but contend that a controlled experience always takes us away from a mystical encounter. Holding creates an impossibility of beholding. And as a monk once told me, “Naming the nameless can leave all unrecognizable.”

Naming an encounter by way of our senses implies an unattainable certitude when really the elusive nature of mystery befalls all of our understanding. Silence is unnameable. To say something is or isn’t, to say something has a name or doesn’t, implies a dualistic nature. And in our desperate nature to cling, we are left time and time again barefaced before the mystery silence is. Only when we rid ourselves of this dualistic nature, we begin to see mystery for what it sincerely is. We begin to touch the bottomless depths of something hosting imponderable facets. 

 While working on In Pursuit of Silence, the topic of silence as a spiritual or religious practice came up on a regular basis. Silence is not necessarily spiritual or religious, and yet for some it may be entirely spiritual or religious. Silence is not a stranger to being likened to God in some fashion, yet similarly silence’s markings have been precisely that not of God, at least by concept. Silence holds the tension of absence and presence. Silence lives and breathes in the paradox of mysteries. Silence is infinite in its magnitude while remaining invariably naught. Silence is fully here and fully there, as much as it is nowhere and everywhere. But to create silence into being solely dualistic is to strip silence of its infinite possibility.  

Maggie Ross has named silence as salvation. Others, like Saint John of the Cross, have marred it with a place of darkness and despair. And yet, these implications don’t diminish the capacity of the thinker to associate such an absence, or presence, with silence as it relates to God or otherwise. And, this is the beauty of silence: it finds its way of understanding into each individual mind. 

“One might say I had decided to marry the silence of the forest. The sweet dark warmth of the whole world will have to be my wife…So perhaps I have an obligation to preserve the stillness, the silence, the poverty, the virginal point of pure nothingness which is at the center of all other loves.” Thomas Merton, Day of a Stranger 

For me, silence has been a place where I find the divine and I find myself. While my wariness of silence has been potent since my first meeting, I realize this is because of the depths of the unknown to which She has taken me. 

Silence is where I meet myself and my fellow human. 

Silence is where I see my darkest corners and my hidden faults. 

Silence is where I meet God. 

Silence is where I can grow and evolve. 

Silence is where I bathe in wonder.

Silence is where I listen. 

I often consider those reoccurring dreams first leading me to a lifelong love affair with the forever unrevealed. I consider the terrified 8 year old worrying her way through life, reaching for something always withheld. To be honest, not much has changed. My worry is now anxiety. My reaching is now a longing. Only now, I sit drenched in wonder as I tirelessly stretch out my arms towards the unknown. Now, I smile in awe as I untiringly attempt to package the mystery in language. 

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Here ends the book, but not the searching. The end of Thomas Merton’s “The Seven Storey Mountain”

 

 

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Cassidy Hall Art, Creativity, Heart, Intention, listening, pilgrim, Writing

Creating From The Wound

I live in Los Angeles, the epicenter of self-defining artists. And, like most people in this city, I consider myself an artist. However, unlike most people living in Los Angeles — I believe we’re all artists in some form or another. I’m in constant awe of the way people create, perform, produce, and refine their skills. I see this in the visual arts, parenting, writing, cooking, teaching, care-taking, and most avenues of life.

In LA, I’m constantly bombarded with things that take me away from my ability to create — the time in traffic, the busyness of a day’s work, the notifications on my phone, the amount of people. Because of this, I try to hike a couple times a week. Hiking seems to be an activity where I process through things in my life — often to the point of talking aloud as strangers walk by me curious about my babbling. More often than not, it’s reworking a conversation and my place in it, sometimes it’s prayer, and other times it’s just a subconscious dialogue I’d yet to consider. This personal jukebox seems to flow most easily in a natural setting; the safety of nature guides me into letting it all out. This sense of safety is not only ingrained in our genetics but is also evident in our psychological interaction with uniting our bodies with the earth.

“We’ve learned over hundreds of thousands of years, that when the birds are singing, we’re safe. It’s only if they suddenly stop that you get a really bad feeling.” Julian Treasure of The Sound Agency via In Pursuit of Silence

While hiking the other day, I unknowingly lifted my right hand to the left side of my face, holding it ever so tenderly, like a lost lover would. I stopped, closed my eyes, and began to weep. After a few seconds of embracing this deep grief, I finally gathered myself enough to keep walking, continuing to cup my own face as if I wasn’t alone, as if I was someone’s beloved, as if she was with me. And, as these moments turn out, I was indeed alone, on a trail, walking by strangers as I held my own face. And just how many times have I found myself grazing my own hand, twisting my own rings, comforting myself? More often than I’d like to admit, but less often than I’d like to feel. 

This alienated agony we all face reminds me of the bottomlessness of my need to belong. A human need that we all know so well. That the depth of my longing is quite simply a part of my being, a part of how I was created, a part of my insatiable thirst for finally feeling home.

“…The normal way never leads home.” John O’Donohue

I’ve often considered one of the few certainties of our lives (as if there were any actual certainties in life) to be found in our relationships. Because, let’s face it, this woundedness demands a sense of tangible security. A security that no human ought to be made responsible to carry for us — both because it is beyond human possibility, and as we well know — the pain never dissipates. The cracks never fill. Belonging feels momentary. Home is never really found. It is eased, comforted, soothed — but it is the precisely the agony of these stirrings that call us to our work. And that is the artist’s response. That is the response of the creative that leans into her image as being made in the image of her creator. That is the moment where we become the artist and create our work. The work so deeply intertwined with eternity — the work that meets the infiniteness of our fellow humans because it comes from the infinite broken-heartedness of our own being.

“We all have wounds. We all are in so much pain. It’s precisely this feeling of loneliness that lurks behind all our successes, that feeling of uselessness that hides under all the praise, that feeling of meaninglessness even when people say we are fantastic—1that is what makes us sometimes grab onto people and expect from them an affection and love they cannot give.” — Henri Nouwen

Our hearts are bottomless pits that no human can fill. But, that is a gift. A gift that must be poured out in the creative work. A gift that requires constant courage and vulnerability of the self. The artist points to eternity because she creates from an eternal emptiness, woundedness, and ache.

These are the things that keep the artist alive. Tenderness. Intimacy. Love. Connection. Community. There are certainly times a friend’s touch can reignite us. There are moments a companion’s gaze can reinvigorate us. And there are seconds our own hand on our face might remind us that we do indeed belong, if only to ourselves. These are the moments that must be recalled time and time again so that we might stay afloat and keep creating.

“Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest external horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.” — Audre Lorde

“…But I believe that loneliness is something essential to human nature; it can only be covered over, it can never actually go away. Loneliness is a part of being human, because there is nothing in existence that can completely fulfill the needs of the human heart.” — Jean Vanier

This piece was originally posted on the Sick Pilgrim Blog.

 

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Cassidy Hall Uncategorized

Trying To Say ‘God’ – Update

This month I’ve spent bouncing around the world from the Pelicam Film Festival in Romania (with the sponsorship of the US Embassy), to the ITMS (International Thomas Merton Society) Conference at St. Bonaventure University, and most recently the literary conference, Trying to Say ‘God’, as put on by Sick Pilgrim and Notre Dame‘s Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts. 

You can learn a lot hanging out with a bunch of people that feel deeply, love with vulnerability, and are open-minded to the insights of one another. At Trying to Say ‘God’, I was surrounded by humans that companion the suffering soul like no other group I’ve ever come across. My heart is not full, but it is alive. My wounds are not healed, but they are tended to. The wisdom and insights I heard at Notre Dame have stimulated my hope, opened my eyes, and quite literally breathed new life into all my anxious uncertainty. I was lucky enough to present on two panels with a few dear friends (see below). I was honored to be with some of the people dearest to my heart. The people that know the bottomless pit of my heart, and still care for it with an unquestioning tenderness. The people that remind me it is so good to be alive. To feel. To touch. To truly see one another with an unbroken attention. Trying to Say ‘God’ wasn’t just a literary conference – it was a soul-touching, faith-filled, vulnerability-doused, honest space of love.

Some of the same full-hearted people were at the Thomas Merton conference where I was able to ignite old and new friendships with soul-touching people. Some highlights from the ITMS 2017 conference include two presentations of the documentary film I helped co-produce, In Pursuit of Silence (releasing in Los Angeles theaters this weekend) and being elected as Secretary of the board for 2017-2019. 

But perhaps the biggest highlight from ITMS comes from my final evening at the Conference. On a cool summer day, I rode with a few friends to a nearby abandoned cottage full of life. It was in this cottage that Poet Robert Lax and his friend Thomas Merton spent the summers of 1939 and 1940. They spent their time there writing, exploring their futures together, and carrying on in their lifelong friendship. As I stood there with my three friends on the porch, taking in the creativity and momentum this small abandoned cottage witnessed; we considered the importance of friendship, the brevity of life, and the never ending communion of prayer. There, I gazed with these three friends past all the human hands pointing to the moon* to graciously embrace what our time there was saying. Over a growler of beer, we took in our poetic moment together. And, in true Lax form, we ever so briefly spoke into the sunset air that surrounded us. Check out more on Lax and Merton in Michael McGregor’s beautiful book, Pure Act: An Uncommon Life of Robert Lax (see below for an excerpt on Lax’s response to Merton’s death).

*”I must state clearly that my teaching is a method to experience reality and not reality itself, just as a finger pointing at the moon is not the moon itself. A thinking person makes use of the finger to see the moon. A person who only looks at the finger and mistakes it for the moon will never see the real moon.” Buddha

Trying to Say ‘God’ Panels:

“The Inner Room: Untrying to Say ‘God’, Allowing Silence to Speak God’s Name” with Kevin M. Johnson and Cassidy Hall

“Notes from a Contemplative: Thomas Merton on the Art of Writing as Resistance and Protest” with Dave Griffith, Gordon Oyer, Kathleen Tarr, Cassidy Hall (you can listen to this one below). 

Speaking at Pelicam Film Festival in Romania
The Merton and Lax cottage
With friend Dr. Chris Pramuk at ITMS
Romanian Boat Ride
Flying over Greenland
Thomas Merton – Panel
Basilica of the Sacred Heart – Notre Dame
Untrying to say God – Panel
The Lax and Merton Cottage
Team Sick Pilgrim
ITMS Board Meeting (Photo Daniel P. Horan, OFM)

From Pure Act: An Uncommon Life of Robert Lax by Michael McGregor (New York, Fordham University Press, 2015) pp. 292-94.

“That evening, as Lax was going into town, he saw a single star and a single cloud above a hill. A poem came to him and he wrote it down, not realizing until later that it was about Merton. A few days later he enclosed it with a letter to Antonucci in which he wrote, “Think somehow night and day about [his death] & him …. Basically feeling o.k. Glad to be here where every part of landscape makes sense.” Antonucci illustrated the poem and published it under the title ‘A Poem for Thomas Merton’:

sin

gu

lar

 

star

 

sin

gu

lar

 

cloud

 

sin

gu

lar

 

hill

 

sin

gu

lar

 

cloud

 

sin

gu

lar

 

star

 

sin

gu

lar

 

hill

one

cloud

 

one

star

 

one

hill

 

one

hill

 

one

cloud

 

one

star

 

Cassidy Hall Art, busy, Creativity, listening, monastery, pilgrim, reminders, Uncategorized

The Great Anesthetic of Modern Day Life

(Originally posted on The Huffington Post Blog.)

“The world is like an anesthetic… people are not going beyond the superficial to the meaning of life — they don’t even ask that question because they’re caught up in that anesthetizing process.” A Monk of Holy Trinity Abbey, Utah

I woke up this morning with an overwhelming feeling of being so distant from my own self. While in the midst of a frenzied work month, drained by piles of to-dos, and in an echo-chamber of my own mind; I seem to have lost touch with the precise thing that brought me here. I’m waking up for a city’s premiere of a documentary film I’ve been working on titled In Pursuit of Silence, and yet, I’ve managed to lose touch with my own silence, space, and solitude. I’ve become the precise paradox our film opens our eyes to; I’ve forgotten myself, my own way of being, and the natural spaces around me. Like an anesthetic fog just after surgery, I’ve been going through my days clouded by the demands of modern day life.

 

Anesthesia seems to be an ideal sentiment for describing the world we live in today. We’re consumed by our phones, computers, televisions, technology, work, and busyness itself. So much so that there’s nothing left of us for the solitude, space, and silence for which we were designed. Our days are so marked by modern day life’s measurements of likes, comments, and first place ribbons of who has the most emails — that we come to the day’s end without the depth of sensations we were created to have. Even our allegiance to the word busy seems to fill our mouths like a badge of honor. Our society tells us only a busy life is a successful and productive life, while research and studies continue to quietly tell us otherwise. There’s an undertone that busy is a title, a symbol we’re doing life right, a life worth living — but what if it’s precisely this busy that anesthetizes us from living a genuine life of meaning, a memorable day, and a life true to who we were made to be?

“Beware the barrenness of a busy life.” Socrates

Spreading ourselves too thin is now the law of the land; we insist we’re no longer good enough or doing enough for the people and world around us unless we’re giving more than what we have. And, as we watch our unique passions, desires, and hopes float away — we decide it’s time to take on even more. We cover our original design with layers of modern day life; we convince ourselves that losing ourselves is loving others more. And still, our purest and richest (in love and joy) selves come out in those moments when we’re true to who we are — listening to our creative urges in work and play, saying a hearty yes or empowering no to those around us, and being able to truly interact with our loved ones from a space of wholeness.

“Within you, there is a stillness and a sanctuary to which you can retreat at any time and be yourself.” Hermann Hesse

For some of us, remaining busy is a way to feel sane — to keep us running from what is really going on, to avoid the truth of ourselves. But, what if the truth is actually an easier space to navigate? What if our true selves contain a space where we can see and feel more whole again — perhaps the real world we need to explore is not the world of to-dos and sensory overload but the vast interior world of ourselves. Maybe it’s time to turn off excerpts of our anesthetizing days so that we might feel again, recenter ourselves again, and re-engage with our natural equilibrium.

 

It seems that even when those small spaces peek up within our days, there is never enough time. Sleep is more important (it often is), my phone is more vibrant, those emails will just add up, and between all the day’s tasks the breaks to breathe are just that — how could anyone expect us to do more than breathe in such moments? And we know that we’re all so beautifully different in these realms: the ways in which we balance ourselves, the different rhythms that agree with us, and what makes sense for each of our lives. Thus, it’s all the more important to tune into our personal ways of being and trust that natural rhythm as we go about our days. The anesthetic fog will come again and again, because it is a part of modern day life — but there’s choice for us somewhere to see beyond that, through that, and let the fog lift.

“At the still point, there the dance is.” T.S. Eliot

Cassidy Hall Uncategorized

To Be OK with the Blank Page

Originally posted on my HuffPost BlogIMG_7807

“You can’t anticipate a garden. Stuff won’t grow until it’s time to grow and when the season’s finished, it’s all over.” -Father Anthony, OCSO

My friend Dave told me once that to be ok with loneliness, you have to be ok with the blank page. Most of us can’t stop thinking or doing when we finally sit with our blank page; we just have to fill in the blanks spaces, the silences, and the quiet moments – covering their richness.

While looking back recently at how I ended up living in Los Angeles and working as an Associate Producer of the documentary film, In Pursuit of Silence, I’m able to see how I listened to myself in the quiet moments that I sat with the blank page.

In the midst of my career as a therapist in 2012, much of my time was spent talking to my clients about goals in their lives, encouraging them in their passions, learning what makes them come alive – while I sat on my own passions.

During that time I developed a growing fascination of monasteries, the lives of monks and nuns, and the words of various authors including Thomas Merton and Henri Nouwen. Little did I know I was beginning to not only sit with my blank page, but also engage with it’s vast and often undisclosed mysteries. Less than a month after quitting my job in 2012 I set out to all of the Trappist Monasteries of the United States from the Nuns in the Redwoods of California to the beer-brewing Monks of Spencer, Massachusetts.

The loneliness and aloneness while traveling alone were some of the hardest and most rewarding mysteries of this journey. It’s the blank page I found and still often find myself running from in order to do as opposed to be. It takes enormous practice and courage to be able to sit in front of that page and rewrite oneself, listen to the often terrifying truths of oneself and strip away the layers the world places on our senses.

My restlessness in these quiet and often silent monasteries was something I knew I needed to sit with and learn from. During these moments, I encountered many negative thoughts and feelings of which I had no desire to see, hear, or listen to. I once asked a nun if the inner noise ever goes away in these quiet times alone, and her response was that perhaps the more important question is why do I want to get rid of the noise in the first place? Even though they’re dark and often gross parts of me, they are parts of me. Living in total hatred of these dark parts of me only creates an unnecessary act of self-violence, just as potentially getting rid of it or hating it might create an unnecessary form of violence in a direction away from myself.

There was nothing pleasurable about thoughts of hatred and sadness within myself, but it was still an opportunity for greater love of myself and ultimately others. There was nothing joyful about sitting through dreadful emotions of the finality of life, the certainty of death, the unattained dreams, the wars of all forms of violence in the world and within myself, my weaknesses in loving others, the forgetfulness of kindness, the inconvenience of gentleness and generosity. Yet, selfishly, as I grew to know more of myself and came to greater self-acceptance, my love for others was deepened alongside my deepening understanding of others.

I once viewed the monastery as a museum – an aesthetic location of a tradition that’s been upheld for nearly thousands of years; a place where people can go to see monks or nuns as if they’re some sort of monument to religion or life. I began all of this with that view in part but certainly ended with a great reverence of not only tradition but more importantly, relationship. Each person I spoke with seemed to provide a pure and humble space where the ground was level, a place where I was truly present with someone, a place where despite our differences we could speak of our darkness and understand one another’s pains.

I used to just see silence as a place of recharging, breathing room, a quiet away from the noise, or even just a peaceful place. Silence has always served one of such feelings to me until I eventually end up getting to the anxieties of my every day life: the unending to do lists, the racing feelings of being unproductive, the worries and concerns of all I cannot control, etc. From my experiences at these various monasteries, I found that it wasn’t until I sat through these things in silence and space that I could reach a much deeper and often darker place of self-discovery, which led and still leads me to more of my true self.

There are no resounding truths or revelations to my pilgrimage in 2012. There are no seeable results or clear-cut facts, and no healed anxieties or depressive states. Instead, I returned in 2012 and still sit in 2014 with more beautifully unanswered questions, more curiosities of mysteries and more reverence for this life that I am able to live.

Now, I no longer have to look friends, family, or clients in the face and encourage them to pursue their dreams and passions while sitting on my own. Now, I can sit with a blank page and be ok.

“…The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone and everything is to succumb to violence. More than that, it is cooperation in violence. The frenzy of the activist neutralizes his work for peace. It destroys his own inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of his own work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful….” Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander

 

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