.....stillness

Yogis,
Last weekend I took a friend to Glenstone museum, a somewhat unique private contemporary art museum (the largest in the US) located in the middle of a residential area only fifteen minutes from my home. The setting is 230 acres of rolling hills and natural landscape with the largest of the exhibit halls, called the Pavilions, set in the center. This was probably my fifth visit but her first.

When you go there you must be prepared to walk. It begins when you park your car between the lines designated by newly planted red oak trees and round river rocks. From there you walk to the reception center where you are checked in and offered information to guide you on your visit. Then it is about another third of a mile walk on pathways uphill to the Pavilions.

Once inside the 204,000 square foot building made of 6 foot precast concrete blocks, you travel through enormous large glass enclosed walkways to each of the thirteen exhibit rooms. Each exhibit hall has a number and contains wide expanses of space from which to view the art. We saw life sized photographs, sculptures, a room with one painting taking up an entire wall and mixed media depicting both the beauty and pain of Black American life.

By the time we arrived in what I believe was room 10, my legs were beginning to beg for rest, so imagine the delight when you enter and a bench that awaits you.   A beautifully crafted smooth wood bench that runs the length of the room facing a wall sized piece of glass framed by the buildings concrete blocks. Here the art is the landscape beyond.

We sit down and discuss the room and what we see and then become quiet. After a few minutes, that predictable inner voice pipes up with its message of ‘ok we have seen this, let’s get up and move on!’ But we didn’t. We sat. And sat. I could feel that moment where the mind finally realized I wasn’t going anywhere and surrendered to the utter stillness

It was only then that I arrived in the space that I was occupying. And with that, an entire new realm opens up.

The glass we looked through was so incredibly clear and pristine that all of the waving grasses beyond it suddenly had definition and depth. A bird silently floated through the air to land on the lone bare tree in our view. The scattered patches of sky visible through the low clouds now appeared baby blue. Looking became seeing. Hearing turned to listening. We sat some more.

At one point my friend turned to me and shared that her late husband had begun to do just this over the last several years. He would stop to look at something and would keep looking and looking and looking…..to the point where it was driving her crazy. We have already seen it. Let’s go! Until the day she realized what he was doing. He was choosing stillness so that he could really see.

With that we sat still some more.

If you look back over your day today, was there any time in which you were perfectly still? Where you surrendered to what is here? Try it now! Complete stillness. Frozen in time. No toe tapping or hands through the hair. What does it feel like to be held by the arms of stillness?

Whenever we choose stillness, clarity arises. Like the glass in the museum, we begin to see life in 3D.

That afternoon we saw millions upon millions of dollars of art, but what I will remember most is sitting still and seeing the sun lowering herself in the winter sky.

As still as in freeze tag,
SARAH