Dear Writing Friends:
I am sitting on my front porch in the rocking chair, notebook on lap, feet perched on a table. It is the first day of fall weather in Austin, and it is heaven to be outside. In the background, the roar, creak, and bang of construction continue from dawn until dusk. The city is tearing up the streets of our neighborhood. This racket is my constant companion.
My personal myth is that I am sensitive to noise. I have no filter for it. I remember when I was in high school trying to do my homework while my brother cranked Sesame Street reruns in the next room. I thought my brain would explode. One day I slinked off to my bedroom and closed my door, and thereafter my mother declared a zone of quiet around me. Grades mattered in our house, and I quickly learned everyone would leave me alone while I was studying. Sometimes I think the whole charade of getting a Ph.D. was an excuse to sit in a quiet library, year after year, by myself. I have always craved silence and solitude.
As I’m developing my coaching practice, I’m integrating sitting meditation into my one-on-one work with clients. It brings us into the present moment together, keeping us mindful and listening to one another. A few weeks ago I had a client come at 8 a.m., normally a peaceful time of day in my writing studio. But when we sat down to meditate, the clang of construction work started revving up for the day.
“We’ll be sitting with a bit of noise,” I said calmly. I had been successfully sitting with the commotion all week and was rather proud of myself for my newfound ability to focus. And then, just as I rang the bell for us to begin sitting, the gardener and his crew showed up, and we were blasted by leaf blowers and lawnmowers right outside the window.
I immediately began rehearsing in my head the litany of apologies I would offer my client when we were finished sitting. He has terrible timing, I imagined myself saying. I would tell her about the day last spring when I carried a cup of tea and my notebook to my front porch and just as I was sinking into my writing, he appeared with his truck and trailer. It was a funny story, I thought. I jumped up and fled to a coffee shop, hauling my notebook, computer, and a stack of books. I am often on the run from noise.
When the gardeners finished, I was relieved. The room was still and we could hear birdsong outside the window. Peace at last. And then the city workers began to tear up the street. Bang, bang, bang, bang. A loud, rhythmic force tore into the concrete. I’ll need to find office space somewhere else, I thought. This isn’t working.
I tried to settle on my breath, but remained agitated and worried about my client. She was paying for this. And then I remembered something I’d read by the avant-garde musician, John Cage, whose work I had studied in graduate school. “Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise,” he wrote. “When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating.” I thought I should give it a try. Rather than wishing it away, perhaps I could sit and listen to the blasting and banging. Anyway, you couldn’t escape it. At times it was so loud, it shook the house. I could feel it in my belly, and it reminded me that sound is vibration. It’s physical. At one point the thought ran through my head that I could use this as material. Wasn’t it my job as a writer to be present to the world and report back?
After twenty minutes, I rang the bell and sitting time was over. My client blinked her eyes a few times and looked up at me.
“That was great,” she said. I nodded my head in agreement and told her I had spent the first five minutes apologizing in my head.
“I barely heard the noise through my thoughts,” she said, laughing. She had been practicing Zen for over twenty years and had a sense of humor about the way the mind traps us. I appreciated that. I told her how it was for me to sit and feel the house shaking around me, my whole body jolted by the pounding of the street.
A week later another client came early in the morning and we sat again with the construction crew as background noise. Another gardener showed up, down the street this time, and the suburban music of lawnmowers and leaf blowers echoed through the neighborhood again. When we were finished meditating, I said something about learning to sit with the noise.
“I love that sound,” she told me with a far-off look in her eye. At this point I wasn’t sure who was teaching whom.
The construction crew continues to arrive every day at 7:00 a.m. sharp. They take a break for lunch and then continue until dark. I recognize the guys now, the dark-skinned man with the long, black sideburns who holds up the Stop sign every day, and the older gentleman who parks his big white truck at the corner. They wave at me when I pass them on my daily walk. I feel self-conscious in my privilege, in my life of relative leisure, working at home on my own schedule. I work hard, but they work harder and longer, and they don’t complain. They show me what work really is and I get down to it.
I’m accustomed to the noise now and the presence of the men moving about the street. I’ll miss them when they move onto the next job. It’s lonely here in the house, and they are good companions.
Last Sunday, I serendipitously picked up the latest issue of the New Yorker. It was sitting in front of me when I sat down to drink my tea on Sunday morning. Inside I found an article about John Cage (I love this kind of synchronicity). “Did Cage love noise?” the writer wondered. “Or did he merely make peace with it?” It seems that Cage was agitated by the sounds coming from his next-door neighbors, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, and asked them if they would remove their speakers from the wall. This made me laugh. “But,” the writer continued, “he trained himself to find noise interesting rather than distracting.”
I don’t know that I’d willingly walk into a construction site and sit down for the concert, but coming face to face with my noise demon has taught me about staying present to things I find uncomfortable—climate change, for example. As writers, and as good citizens, it’s important to turn and face unpleasantness in order to be better witnesses to our world.
This month’s quotation is a poem by Jane Kenyon.
The Visit
The talkative guest has gone,
and we sit in the yard
saying nothing. The slender moon
comes over the peak of the barn.
The air is damp, and dense
with the scent of honeysuckle. . . .
The last clever story has been told
and answered with laughter.
With my deep sleeping self I met
my obligations, but now I am aware
of the silence, and your affection,
and the delicate sadness of dusk.
Writing topics:
A memory of sound
A memory of silence
Monday Night Practice Group continues. My intentions are to hold a space for us to practice together, creating a community around meditation and writing practice, and to provide a structure that will feed our writing throughout the week. It is a deeply peaceful and pleasurable time. If you live in Austin, and you’ve studied with me before, I hope you’ll join us. You’ll be amazed what it does for your writing and your life. The schedule for the remainder of the fall is as follows:
Session II
Dates: October 25, November 1, 8, and 15.
Time: 6:00 – 8:00 p.m.
Location: Congregation Beth Israel, 3908 Shoal Creek
Cost: $50
Session III
Dates: November 22 and 29, December 6 and 13
Time: 6:00 – 8:00 p.m.
Location: Congregation Beth Israel, 3908 Shoal Creek
Cost: $50
In Process Coaching:
I have not yet launched my new website or formally announced my coaching business – that’s coming in the new year – but I am seeing clients and a have a few spaces open for the fall.
If you have a desire to write, but haven’t found a way in, or you are writing but want to go deeper,
If you see writing as a way of connecting to the world, something larger than production and publication,
If you understand writing as a process and a path and that progress doesn’t necessarily move neatly from Point A to Point B,
If you have an established meditation practice or other mindfulness practice, or you would like to establish one in conjunction with writing,
I’d love to work with you. My process is intuitive and effective. Using meditation, writing practice, deep reading, and close listening as our tools, I take my clients from naked writing practice to fully dressed, publication-ready work. If you’re interested, give me a holler.
I think that’s it for now.
My best to each of you.
Saundra