by Brian Leibold, Diamond Approach student in the Diamond Approach Washington D.C. Group 2
The morning here in Portland, Maine, is calm, and I sit silent and content, though I know it will not be long before the muddy water in my soul floods through the canyon where I wander, lost and thirsty. When the flood comes, may I remember the still lake in the Alaskan Kenai Peninsula that I climbed above four autumns ago, up to where the sun sparkled off the snow, and how I looked down at the coming storm, with the rainclouds reflected below in the lake, in its own way no less wild than the turbulent floodwaters.
After that storm, I went on a hike from the lake to the Russian River Falls. Thousands of little raindrops hung from the branches of trees, waiting to drop as I stood hypnotized on the bank watching the river flow, listening to it rage, trying to feel something of its intense power. My eye fell upon a bird flying just over the fast-moving water, close to its fierce surface. Too close. Right before the bird made it to the opposite bank, it flew over a spot where the rapids were especially rough and was caught by the water. I made a sudden instinctual lunge toward it, as if to—what? Jump in? Save the bird?
I did not know this tiny creature's name or its gender, but later that night, in a tent on the Homer Spit, I wrote about the event in my notebook and asserted that it was female. Somehow this seemed to help ease the pain of a lonely hour. This bird that I declared female had less than a second to get to the opposite bank, or else she would drown or be smashed against the rocks and die; she would become part of the river, this river that was so full of life. She’d become part of the great movement, in the midst of all the surging and emerging, the coming and going. But it didn't happen; she didn't die. Somehow the bird got out and made it over to the other side just in time.
This bird that had been close, so close, to death started singing immediately. She was alive, and it was good and right to see her live and hear her sing. I did not know her name, and it did not matter. She seemed to sing with extra gusto after her brush with death, and I could hear her even over the din of the falls. I stood there for a long time, listening to her death-defying song.
When my suffering has dragged me to the banks of Lethe and all I wish to do is dive in, my plea for mercy must be like the spirited psalm of this small bird saved from death, ringing forth with full-throated praise to join the inimitable music of the river. If I complain or whine or pout, my self-pity and resentment will destroy the beauty and clarity of the pure plea. When the plea has been answered, not through words but in silence, the thunderous storm of questions that devastate the mind’s city and pour like volcanic ice into my soul will quiet. The burning need for things to be different from the way they are now will disappear—not forever, but for the moment. While the feet stand solidly on the cool earth, the ears take in the song of resurrection and flight, take it in all the way in to the center of the heart, which will burst open and sing its own song, in its own voice—a song as incomparable as the river’s ceaseless roar, and as silent as the other is loud. May I trust the answers that come in this silence.
I am thankful for the storm, and I am thankful for the calm afterwards, when the surviving bird sings. Both the storm and the calm are necessary. This morning I enjoy a reprieve from the judging beast. It is not that he is gone, just that he knows which battles to pick—in what state and under which circumstances to attack. This morning I am protected, not by walls that I painstakingly construct to protect myself from pain, but by taking them down. I open now to the support of a silence that never walls itself off from noise, that is present always even in the midst of the crowd, that lives forever within its stampede, and beneath my restless feet, rooted into unshakable ground.
I sit alone, but for once not lonely, and wait for light to arrive.