Tag: #bestill&know

Why I Need Silence

Featured by Rachel Landrum Crumble, posted in Memoir, Reflections

Today in the soothing quiet of the Rec Center pool, an insight bubbled up regarding a life-long pattern. I have always loved silence.

            I am maybe 4, the youngest of 6 at our noisy dinner table. My parents ask questions of each child to find out about our day. This is effortless for the older ones—Becky 6, Dave 9, Mike and Margy 11, and Steve 13. I watch, waiting to be invited in. My mother can tell I have something to say, and calls on me, bidding the others’ attention. “Rachie has something to tell us..”  Even with one or two follow up questions, the polite silence does not feel like attention but interruption. Inevitably, whatever I had to say that day was met with a perfunctory 30 seconds of silence before their conversations resumed.  Looking back on it now, I felt like I was the commercial spot in their much more interesting “regularly scheduled programming.”

            In another memory at 5 or 6: It is spring or early summer. I have dressed myself and stolen outside in the early morning to the swing set in our yard behind the manse, a dewy field of young corn is behind me, the red brick church building my father preaches in is to my left in front of me. I drink in the welcoming silence of the new day. I watch the bats wheeling across the blue, back to the white steeple bell tower; I hear the proverbial early bird, a robin, rifle the ground and pull out a nightcrawler. I witness the small globes of dew hanging like pearls on a spider web. There is much chaos in the house by mid-morning, but at this hour outside I see and feel enfolded in created order. There is room for my voice here. I can speak my thoughts out loud, or remain one with the stillness.

            In this memory, I am 30. I am a young mom now, sitting in my favorite recliner by the window in the living room. I am here with my journal and my Bible, stealing a few moments alone with my thoughts in the early morning before my precious little daughter, 3, and my son, 1 storm the living room and hijack my day. My mother has recently taken her life after years of living with the excruciating pain of schizophrenia. I pour out my pain in rushed cursive into my journal. My sweet little daughter appears in the doorway. Not a storm at all, but a gentle morning breeze. I welcome her into my silence and we sit awhile, as her mind wakes up and I have the privilege of listening to her thoughts before her brother wakes up and we are on with our day.

            This last memory feels like a nightmare now. I am 58. I have stayed too long in a job that doesn’t love me. I am a Special Ed Inclusion teacher, and I have only ever wanted to do what my official title is—to be a co-teacher. In this room, I have been told to sit in the back and BE QUIET. I have been told by the General Ed teacher that my rotating through the classroom during the work period to engage with all students and question them to go deeper is “needling“ them. After the opening lecture, I am ushered across the hall with “my” students with Individualized Education Plans. These students were placed in “co-teaching” General education classes, but my colleague sends us away to be more like a Resource class. I pour into them, the injustice hanging in the air like smoke. Most of them make the best grades in the class, but we are “smelling the smoke”—the injustice. I feel powerless to put out the fire. When I finally tell my colleague he is breaking the law, he gives full vent to his irrational ire. Nothing changes, but my failing health.

            Today, at 64, after a year of retirement, I realize why I got so auditorily exhausted by the end of a “teaching” day. I was required to pay attention to all the noise around me while being banished to silence who I really am. I was a piece of furniture, a complication in the General Education teacher’s day, I was a glorified aide whose judgments even on who to allow to go to the bathroom were second guessed. In short, I was relegated to be treated like the youngest at the table without a voice.

            Now I can bathe in healing silence. I can choose to be with people in structured ways, and I do, or have a tête-à-tête with a friend. I can create characters on the pages of a fledgling novel, or jot poems and reflections in my journal with no interruptions. I can walk the hilly paths of a nearby cemetery in the cool of a morning and remember and re-experience the magic of mattering to God.

Hammock Time

Featured by Rachel Landrum Crumble, posted in Uncategorized

I began writing this the day after Election Day. The literal season isn’t right for hammocks in many parts of the country, but the emotional season is ripe for Hammock Time.

            My adult sons had returned from Brooklyn at the start of the pandemic. They were FaceTiming us as they walked the empty streets of Brooklyn in late morning. Both were already idled from their jobs. They had the feeling that NYC was on the verge of a hard lockdown. They were with us in Chattanooga by midnight. In May, for Mother’s Day, they bought me a variegated aqua-teal hammock, the parachute material kind. My husband and sons installed in in our private side-yard between a big old oak tree and our 6 foot wooden fence.

            I think of myself as a relatively tranquil person, but my children and my husband have lived with me. So this gift of love came from 30 years and nearly 22 years of life experience with Mom.

             We were comforted in being together until mid June, when Chattanooga became a hot spot, and NYC was calming down.

            Calming down, yes—back to the hammock. It became an extension of the living room, but not right away. At first, I felt like I couldn’t afford the time, even though it had been lovingly bought and installed for me.

            Since mid-March, 6 days before my sons came, the high school were I teach, like schools all over the world, closed and went online—just like that. Eight to ten hours a day I was on my laptop navigating ways to add interactive learning to Goggle Classroom and encourage and support students with learning challenges via Google Classroom messages, phone calls, texts and Zoom, as well as preparing all kinds of required reports and documenting myriads of parent contacts.

            I cooked dinner most nights, because we all needed the comfort of sharing a meal around the table.

            My students, their parents, my family and I were all trying to adapt to this new normal of sheltering in place, and caring for ourselves and each other.

            My sons used the hammock more than I did. I made an effort to get outside and sit cross-legged in the middle, or lie down for a few minutes. But inside my head, an alarm would be going off. These were the lies I believed: I don’t have time for this, I have too much to do, but the deeper message I have told myself for years with dire consequences was that I don‘t deserve to rest since the whole world was in turmoil.

            I likened it to sitting in the car with the motor running in the driveway, unable to get out and come inside at the end of a long workday. Except I worked from home, and my nervous system was the motor that was always humming. Uh-oh. Back to the knee-jerk hyper-vigilance learned in childhood trauma. (I grew up with a beautiful. loving mother whose schizophrenia traumatized us all. That story is for another time.)

            In my twenties, my mind was always in overdrive. At night I would lie in bed and replay every interaction I had that day and critique it. Why didn’t I say this instead of that? Why didn’t X respond to me the way I wanted? What’s wrong with me? Should I call tomorrow to apologize? And on and on….

            As a young mother, if I had a few minutes in the car by myself to run to the store, I always had to give myself an assignment: plan for the next few hours, pray for friends who were going through things, decode a confusing Interaction I had, solve a problem. For hyper-vigilant survivors of trauma, there is no rest for the weary. Finally, God broke through to me to just STOP.

            Fast forward to 2020. In January, I had committed to being in a year long online “Get Clear, Get Focused” group and working on a year long curriculum with Tom Griffith, beginning with discovering my design and purpose, gifts and passions, reviewing my life experiences, for patterns, then on to being thoughtful about my roles and networks of relationships, and just when I felt stuck like an archeologist at a dig of an ancient city armed with only a teaspoon and a brush, the next thing in the curriculum is Rule of Life.

            So, hey, just what do I need to be practicing on regular and semi-regular basis to be productive in my life as I pursue purpose? I began to allow myself Sabbath rest for 24 hours each week, not because I earned it, but because craved it. Then I began to break off bite-sized Sabbath rest during the week by lying in the hammock, suspended between heaven and earth, and just let it hold me. And this is exactly how I picture it: I am in the hand of God, and if I am in God’s hand, I can relax every muscle in my body. I can let go that habit of hyper-vigilance, or overstimulation to the point of exhaustion, and stare at the sky through the trees, and just let my mind float with the clouds.

            Returning to school in the fall, I was thankful to be allowed to be co-facilitator of an online learning platform from campus, [instead of teaching in the classroom] although for a time I had 180 English students (later redistributed so I ended up with 112) grades 9th-12th, plus other responsibilities.  I would come home from work with severe eyestrain as a result of 7-8 hours of online work. That’s when I began throwing myself into that hammock—God’s hand—and staring up as high as I could imagine beyond and through the trees, just to regain my distance vision, and turn off the humming motor of my tired brain.

            Hammock time has become an organic part of my daily practice. Sometimes I stretch out and stare at clouds, or watch the squirrels impossible treks from one tree to the next, like a magic path in the air they intuit, then paint behind them with their tails.

            Sometimes I lie there and pray and cry until I am unburdened.

            Sometimes I record the woods sounds on my phone.

            Sometimes I dictate lines of poetry that come to me as I stop the world and get off.

            Now it has gotten so that Mickey, my 12-year-old black lab mix, sits on the back step and refuses to come in until I have come out with him to the hammock. He digs in the soft dirt under the trees, or sits as close as he can so I can lie there and put my arm around his neck and bury my fingers in his fur. He makes happy dog noises: “Woo-wooo!”

            Since Daylight Savings time, I sometimes have to bundle up and go out in the dark and gaze up at the stars.

            Especially now, after a vicious election cycle, as daylight is gone after work, as the world faces the second wave of this COVID-19 pandemic, we could all do with a little “hammock time.” I imagine when the elements won’t allow, “God’s hand” will be the loveseat in my living room, but it could also be a cot in prison, a seat on a city bus. The place doesn’t have to matter as much as taking the time—breaking off moments of Sabbath rest during a busy week, to be still and know that no matter what, God, and creation is still there.