It’s the final Porch of 2024, and it was a gift for me to read the two pieces we’re publishing today - Jasmin Pittman’s short essay At the Pace of the Forest, and Michelle LeBaron’s poem subtitled a writer puts her phone down.
In that same spirit, we’re not going to bombard you with words.
Every wisdom tradition advocates for two things that are least obviously present in the cultures shared or overlapped by most of the good folk reading The Porch:
slowness
and
silence.
Least obviously present, but no less available. Like John Lewis’ assertion that he could love the man beating him because the love was already there, I just joined it, silence and slowness are there too. They can be claimed.
Even those who have suffered pain and oppression unimaginable to most of us assert this is true. Not always easy (though people much wiser than I think it can become easy, with practice), not always the first evident thing, but claimable.
This past year I’ve found myself claiming slowness and silence, sometimes being claimed by them or crashing into them as a necessity.
It’s not been an easy year. But when slowness and silence have found me, ease has been, at least, near.
I’ve found some of that silence and slowness on walks in my favorite places - the North Down coastal path, the Warren Wilson College river trail.
I’ve found it at the core beneath the visible surface of meals with friends, of the privilege of accompanying people in pain, and of being accompanied in mine.
It’s been present when people have shared a kind and encouraging word; or when a mentor has told me they understand what I’m struggling with.
I’ve been sometimes enveloped in it while reading Sun House, David James Duncan’s massive novel which, it has been said, doesn’t just describe the kind of consciousness required for the transcendent experience of beauty and interdependence, but induces it.
I’ve fallen into it, sometimes, while writing - usually with a pen, sometimes with a keyboard.
The slowness and the silence have been awakened by the most elevating parts of the movies I’ve watched - All We Imagine as Light, Joker: Folie à Deux, Evil Does Not Exist, Rebel Ridge, Conclave, Anora, Small Things Like These, Wicked, Challengers, Sing Sing, His Three Daughters, It’s Only Life After All, I Saw the TV Glow.
And I’ve felt it most of all with the friend with whom I share my life, holding hands at midnight.
And right now, listening to James Newton Howard’s music from Terrence Malick’s film A Hidden Life, or near-daily with The Lark Ascending or Van Morrison’s Hymns to the Silence, and Beyoncé’s American Requiem for a few weeks of repeat listening in late Spring.
There is a slowness and a silence at the depths of your being, dear reader. I promise you that. And if you will ask it to reveal itself to you, and learn the practice (a lifelong practice) of claiming the slowness and the silence, everything will change.
But only all the time.
The cultural tradition of Christmas, the tradition from which I come, is a bit confused about itself. It’s noisy and materialistic and often the pretext for relational tension and family crisis. But when the commercial and busyness trappings fade, everybody knows that Christmas is about an eruption of ineffable Good into the world, and the advocacy of a Rule called Golden because it truly is not only the path to greatest treasure, but the treasure itself. A Rule that life is found in interdependence, not dominance or extraction, with individuals, communities, and ecosystems.
Love your neighbor(hood) as yourself.
Love yourself as your neighbor(hood).
This love is not a victory march, but an invitation to actually becoming the enormous thing that you are - an embodiment of goodness beyond words, an utterly unique conversation with reality, in service to life and worthy of life’s gifts, an irreplaceable facet of being itself.
I think these things are true whether or not Christmas is part of your cultural tradition - so what I wish for you today and in the season that most authentically begins tomorrow and runs for twelve days, is that the spirit of your own magnificence, interdependent with everyone - and everything - else, would be (re)born in you, wherever you are.
Gareth Higgins is the co-founder of The Porch. Find him at www.garethhiggins.net, or join him on an Ireland Retreat at www.irelandretreats.com
