The Autumn Garden

I was recently walking in a perfectly manicured September garden. Summer blooms had been replaced by the more humble offerings of fall and the garden had a sparseness and simplicity that took my breath away. I've always loved the magnificent abundance of the Fall: the harvest, the foliage, the moon. This year though, I'm experiencing Fall through different eyes: autumn eyes. Eyes that seek out spaciousness and simplicity; eyes that find comfort in brown grass dying back down into the earth. There is a softness to the autumn garden I've not seen before. And a silence that roars in my heart.

The silence speaks its own special language, pulling me deep inside myself. Absorbing me in that inner sense of knowing. This listening to silence has a fierceness to it. It moves me into unexpected places, pushing me up against notions of who I am and why I'm here. It laughs at me too, testing my trust in myself. Am I willing to rest in the air of my being. Am I really okay with how fluid the ground I want so solid beneath me truly is. Can I sit still, can I wait, can I look and see what is, rather than what I want it to be.

Sitting in the Great Bowl of Silence

Many years ago, one of my spiritual mentors gave a beautiful teaching on the syllable "om." He said that if we really listened, we could hear "om" vibrating inside every sound. I performed this practice diligently and while I can't say I began to hear that subtle om within the cacophony of daily life, something else happened: my capacity to listen went deeper.

I began to sense a great bowl of silence inside me, and worked to root my listening as far down into it as I could manage. This allowed me to listen with very clean ears and opened me into hearing what I think of as the deep song. Which is not a song at all. It's a presence. The more I learned to listen to my own deep song, the more I began to recognize it in others. And that was when I realized my calling as a transformational healer and teacher.

Several years later, when I began to study Sanskrit, I was astounded by the way the sound of "om" moves through us. Try it and you'll see. It begins deep in the belly with the mouth wide open and ends on the lips with the mouth fully closed. It was then that I finally got it. In the way that making the sound of "om" mimics the opening and closing of any process, metaphorically at least, "om" does contain everything.

And the thing of it is, one can ride "om" into the very depths of our being. Which is where we find the great bowl of silence. Try it. Sit in a meditative stance and bring your focus to breathing. Just listen. Listen to the in-breath. Listen to the out-breath. Listen to the space between them. Listen for that subtle vibration of "om." Listen for the silence underneath it all. And when you stand up, moving into daily life action, try to move from that silence. Practice this for awhile and see how you feel.

We live in a time when marketing is everything, when the pitch has to tell us what we get before we're willing to buy. So I'll tell you a secret: the great bowl of silence contains everything. Once we begin to touch it in a regular kind of way, life takes on a whole different feel. The poet-saint Kabir expressed this so beautifully when he sang: Inside this clay jug there are canyons and pine mountains, and the maker of canyons and pine mountains! All seven oceans are inside, and hundreds of millions of stars. The acid that tests gold is there, and the one who judges jewels. And the music from strings no one touches, and the source of all water.

Kabir finishes his song proclaiming, If you want the truth, I will tell you the truth: Friend, listen: the God I love is inside of me. He might as well have named it Silence.