Be Still

I was a precocious young boy. Curious about things. Constantly talking and moving. Imagining what the world could be. I know, looking back, I must have been a handful, especially for my mom who had to tend to a special needs child and my other sister and brother.

I have these battle scars on my head, arms, and legs. Fights and falls that left their marks. I don’t remember all of them. But some I do – like the go-cart accident. We were taking turns driving down the circle on Rose Drive in East Moss Point, where my dad built a house and I spent the first seven years of my life, with our dog, Bimbo, and the rusted porch swing that looked back on Coach Haynes’ house. I didn’t want to wait for my turn to drive. So, I sat on top of the seat while our neighbor, James, drove at top speed. He turned abruptly, and I went flying underneath the go-cart. Luckily, I had on a helmet. My right leg took the brunt of the damage. I got up screaming, hopping home in excruciating pain but worried about having to wake up my mom who worked the night shift. I was a handful.

On other occasions, I can clearly hear her, with a tone of exasperation, saying to me, “Why don’t you be still? Just close your mouth.” In fact, she used to pay me to be quiet. My mom wasn’t being mean. She just needed some peace. Now, ironically, I get paid to run my mouth.

I have always felt this sense of urgency in my gut: that life wasn’t going to wait for me, and I had to go after whatever life I imagined as my own. Boredom scared me as if it was an indication that I would be stuck in Moss Point forever: that the sentences in my head and the fire shut in my bones would stall while I worked at the regional library or on whatever job that didn’t require me to do physical labor. My mother was clear. “I was born to push a pencil,” she said. Too lazy to do anything else.

In those moments when forced to be “still,” my imagination soared. I transformed my bed into a race car. I dreamed that I was a Mage in Terry Brooks’s world of Shannara. I snuck under my bed with a candlelight (damn near set the bed on fire) and read until my head hurt. Being still meant opening myself to the workings of imagination. And, later, I would come to read in Ralph Waldo Emerson that God speaks to us through our imaginations. And, I suppose, heaven is glimpsed in those moments, too.

With all the detritus coming at us these days, with democracy in peril, we need to cultivate the habit of “being still” – of allowing our imaginations the freedom to roam. To let boredom in, so that we might hear the words of God. Put the phone away. Turn off the television, the games, and avoid social media for a moment. Allow ourselves a chance to hear our own thoughts, to feel what we feel in our gut, to be quiet and still. This is the readying of the self for the world that is and awaits.

My mom wanted peace, and, in her own way, she offered her baby a way to feel it, too. Trump and his people want us obsessing over them; they want to occupy our thoughts and spirit as they destroy the country. We must refuse all of it. Create the space for us to imagine ourselves differently. Be still and hear the words of God. And then move with a force of intention and power that can make the world anew.