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What I notice, when I am still

Sometimes, I wake up and immediately start to write in my disco notebook. It is silver and it glitters so much, it could blind you actually. I got it from my friend Greta Brinkman, a bass goddess and one of my oldest friends. We have been roommates too. She is cool. Which you can tell, since she knows to give me disco notebooks!
Sometimes, right after waking up, sipping my coffee, I find my thoughts so deep and profound and interesting, that I feel the total urge to share them here with you all. Maybe I should not do that, but I can not restrain myself. So, take this, people and have a great day!

What I notice, when I am still

The cat purring beside me. He sounds like a tractor or a car engine. Content.
I hear a little sound in my ears, a quiet sound. I call it stillness. Its where I dive into, whenever I sit on my zafu, or wherever I happen to remember, that this little sound is my home, is really everything I need. When I am still, which I hardly ever am, which I try to be nevertheless as often as possible, because it is total bliss, I love myself and everybody, everything else. I know then how much I really am part of everybody else – even the refugees from Syria, the aborted second children from China and the midwifes helping to keep them from being born, the Dalai Lama too, not just bad stuff. Good bad, no difference. That’s the truth in the depth of my stillness. I am part of the elephants in Kenia, threatened to be extinguished by greed, I am the greed too, but I am also love, pure and clear. I am Auschwitz, I was there, the young jewish mother, the young gipsy girl, the gay man, I was killed, I was raped, I starved, I was the SS man, and the capitalist making tons of money from my slave labour, I am the German pretending to have noticed nothing out of the usual – when I am still, when I know all this, you might think, I am unhappy, but no, this is happiness, total bliss. Good, bad, evil, no difference. Not in the sense, don’t get me wrong, of it doesn’t matter. But in the sense of: deep down we are all one, there is no separation. Love. Breathe into this, and try to do your best. That’s all.

When I am still, which I hardly ever am, I have this constant list of things to do in my head. Its running on autopilot: clean the bathroom, go outside for a walk, write your novel, write another poem, tend to your garden, do nothing for a change, grocery shopping!!!! breathe more evenly for heavens sake, drink water, brush your teeth, get dressed…..the list is never ending and renews itself every second. List of duties, mostly self created. My discipline is to become a better person, to stop gossiping, to stop producing more negativity, which is not at all about hurting people: you can be the most loving and positive person in the world, you will still hurt others. It is rather about being true. When I am still, I hear that little voice. It comes after I listened a while to that sound, the quiet one, in my ears. I can really count on this voice always knowing exactly what to do next (nothing?) The thing which amazes me most about this voice is, that it knows every answer to every question, to every problem and it doesn’t even have to think about it. The answers come seemingly out of nowhere, but of course, they do come out of the depth of that little sound I call stillness. I know everything will always fall into place if I dare remaining in the company of that sound, wherever.

© Susanne Becker

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