It is easy to forget silence exists or what it really means, even if most of the noise is in my head and created by words, images, news, concerns, planning, existential concerns. The true impulse of creativity at times seems far off like a distant memory. I can sit here and see manifestations of it in my paintings, pottery, poems. But on a deeper level, I forgot: there is a place out of which everything arises. I forgot for a while to take the time for it. Before my last post about signs of hope, I had not written on this platform since January 2016. Being overly responsible, I kept up with everything, the civil rights work, planting flowers and vegetables, designing and building a house, learning to paint with oils. But, given the deep punch in the gut of a horrible national decision, I was shaken. Why were the attacked institutions of our Democracy personal? How could the upending of decency and killing shots at Democracy topple my personal equilibrium? I was angry, so it became a time of “action” – to put equal energy against a backward negative tide of meanness.

Niece Miranda knitted us pink hats for a Women’s March in Chicago.

And so, life went on that way, not quietly, not settled down. Knocked off the pedestal of privilege, on the ground with everyone else who was never allowed on it in the first place. In those four years our law firm took the lead in a nationwide case alleging systemic race discrimination in housing. We watched front line/essential workers sacrificed to the pandemic. We broke inside over the racist killing of George Floyd and too many others and were encouraged by the swelling marches for Black Lives.

I found myself saying the other day that it has been a dark four years for me. That is not the entire picture or the entire truth. There have been many wonderful times, experiences, people, growth, beauty, and love, but a veil has lurked in the background, shading the field. The veil was allowed there. Maybe it would have been too superhuman a feat to get past it, so I can cut myself some slack. What is on the field, what is the field itself, is the most important thing. In spiritual terms it is the “ground of being,” the present moment or “the Now,” or the creative impulse, or God that is the field or on the field, always there, but not noticed or seen much of the time. I was reading last night a simple explanation of how silence is a pathway of connection to the infinite, to potentiality. Of course. I meditated each morning for years and years, but only in fits and starts over the past few. Today I sat quietly and watched the sun come up out back, over the field, and re-membered. It happens like that, so simply, in silence. That is Grace.