Stillness, I hear...

Stillness is your essential nature.... You are that awareness disguised as a person.
                                                                                                                 ~ Eckhart Tolle

I have been fidgeting, standing on one foot, then the other. Minutes tick by, nothing. Stillness is my destination: that land of Being, that land of no thought, no story, no judgment and no second-guessing myself. Yet, I have not arrived at this velvet inner-space, this sense of presence.

I keep watching the Santa Catalina's  rise just beyond the dry, river bed, hoping somehow my Being will awaken this essence, this truer identity, with its eyes, its ears, and its heart -- often a different one then when trapped in thought and mental noise.

I notice birds sitting on a wire that hangs across the wash. Sixty-one birds I count. All are facing south. I watch these silent silhouettes against a grey sky. Minutes and more go by -- it does take a little time to count sixty-one birds on a wire. I wait. A lone bird flys in. Will it disturb? No, it just slips in between two others, wing to wing.  Now, sixty-two birds are sitting on a wire.

Then something shifts. I am settling down into this rich texture of silence. No need to fidget. This stillness is teaming with life, energy, intelligence and truer identity. The bud knows its spring, the silent tide follows the moon and the bird will fly north faithfully in the spring. Their stillness feels, in me, higher than these mountains.

Tis almost like these birds throw this line out, inviting me to grab hold and swing out into their inner-space, their stillness, into their sense of larger being. We feel another's sadness, another's love. If there is laughter we often find ourselves laughing. This borrowing is happening more often, be it watching a cloud, standing by this mesquite tree or listening to the (rare) rain on my umbrella.

These are the forms of this stillness that are beyond this word I am writing and beneath this thought I am thinking. This is the stillness that is between us, that acts like fragrance in our loving be it a flower, a child or a friend. This is the stillness that lives between the fingers, in the space, when the breath is caught by the beauty of sixty-two birds sitting on a wire.