Sit still !!

This weekend I went to the premiere of " Hoffen und Sehnen" In Schauspielhaus Bochum. A great play in the courtyard in front of the theater. It was a play or better yet a spectacle with professionals and amateurs telling the story of how the first Polish and Turkish workers came to Bochum. A play by Akın Emanuel Şipal. And directed by Liesbeth Colthof. In this play there was this character. A Polish woman called Irka who just couldn't sit down. Always busy running around. I could relate to her instantly. I was her years ago. She tried to sit when she was urged to do so. On her face we could see how nervous she got. Not one minute it lasted before sitting became unbearable. I remembered how I felt. The moment I sat I got restless.

I had to keep busy. I was literally running. Running from feeling. feeling the grief underneath the surface. The ignored grief. One day my singing teacher told me to sit still for ten minutes a day. She gave me no particular reason why. But I could guess I was too tensed. I can tell ya. It was torture for me. Inside I would feel like a centrifuge coming to a stop banging! Jerking and thrusting. And then the crying would start. Very often I had no idea why. Slowly I started to feel again. Going through the pain causing my grief. Up to that moment I had been thinking my way through life to survive. These days I trust my feelings more and I have learned to act on them. They are far more reliable than my thinking. My mind often plays tricks with me.

I had forgotten I was Irka. And I could hardly believe I once was her. Once the pain is gone, somehow you forget. You can't remember what it was like. It's just...gone. Now I am more like the child I was in my early years.

wordlessness. Silence for the advanced

As a child I was very quiet. I whispered till the age of three. My mother jokes about it. Saying I was saving my voice for later! In the family There is a story told about me. It's been told I was sitting at the breakfast table in my high chair as a two year old. I was so quiet and still. That when a fly sat on my high chair I ever so slowly lowered my index finger to the fly in supreme concentration, totally quiet,  and pressed  the poor thing to death. I meant no harm. I just did it. Now, flies have these super duper eyes!

A sphere full of lenses

The eyes of insects are compound eyes or compound eyes. Facet eyes consist of a lot of separate partial eyes, the ommatidia. Sometimes there are thirty thousand! Each partial eye has its own lens and sees a very small part of the world. All these partial eyes together form a larger picture of the world, like a kind of mosaic.

We always only look in one direction with our eyes. If we want to know what is happening behind us, we have  to turn our heads. Thanks to their bulbous eyes full of partial eyes, which point in all directions, insects see their entire environment. That's why a fly almost always sees you coming, no matter which way you're sneaking up on it. So that I was able to crush it can only be explained by saying I was in a state of wordlessness.

It is a state of mind where you have no words in your head. There are people who say that that is not possible. I dare to say it is!. It's the space in between two words. When you wait for a word to come into your thoughts and hold the waiting, there is this void. You can practice this in nature. In a field full of wild geese. They will sart croaking loudly  when you approach them. Even from a mile away. Drop into the silence waiting for a thought. stay in the void. be still. They will shut up! Feeling no presence and therefore no danger.

I knew the state of being. But found the word for it only a few years ago.

The word wordlessness I have from a book written by my favorite life coach Martha Beck. " Finding your way in the wild new world."  The book is in my bookcase on my website with a button link where you can purchase it if you're interested.