Kindred Spirits: Barbara Brown Taylor

“From where I stood, I could not see a sign of human occupation. Like a child who has not yet dodged a blow, the river in front of me was innocent of what lay ahead. The water was so clear I could see a lazy carp paddling below me. The only debris was a high-water mark made of small sticks and leaves. There were raccoon tracks in the sand where the rock met the riverbank and white splats on the stone where some big water bird had stopped to fish for a spell…

If I softened my gaze and stopped holding myself apart from all that surrounded me, I became part of something so old and so powerfully alive that I lost track of my self. The river ran through me. Trees breathed for me. My feet grew from rock. The only thing wrong with any of these sentences is that there was for that moment no ‘me’ or ‘my.’ I lost my ‘me’ altogether, which of course was not apparent until I came back to my self, recovering one sense of reality at the price of the other.”

-Barbara Brown Taylor, Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith

Reverend Taylor’s description of this divine moment reminded me of a similar moment of my own from 17 years ago.

It was a freezing cold night in the first winter of the new millennium, and I was a 22 year-old about to leave the United States to live in Central Asia in the Peace Corps.

Though I still had no experience of god or spirit at that time (that would come much later), I distinctly remember a moment of awareness just as Reverend Taylor described so eloquently above.

I remember I was standing on my mother’s front porch, and I had just finished shoveling her very long driveway.  But rather than go back into the house to warm up, for no apparent reason, I decided to stand in the night air a little longer.

I remember I was tired and breathing heavy, and I remember the quiet.

In New England, when there is a thick coat of snow on the trees and ground, there can be a kind of silence like no other silence I am aware of.  It has an intensity to it that feels ancient and holy.

I don’t know what led me to enter into the stillness, except to say I felt a very crisp, fine-tuning of my senses in that moment, and a sensation of the moment itself pressing hard against my skin.

The moment did not last long of course—a fraction of time I’m sure—but for just that instant, I had a sense of fluidity in which the edges of my self blurred into a whole I never knew existed.

After the moment passed, I just silently turned and walked back inside because I had no words for what I had just gone through- no framework to help me understand it in any sort of meaningful way.  It simply became one of those experiences that I tucked away inside of me for another time in the future when greater insight might help me clarify the glorious (and at times confusing)  nature of reality.

This possibility for an unfolding at a later time is for me part of the beauty and mystery of reality though;  when the words of a kindred spirit can mine those dormant gems out from the deep caverns of our internal landscape so that we may finally integrate those experiences in an elegant, new way.