I imagined breast-feeding to be the most natural, organic experience between newborn and newmother. My son would breathe lungs full of air and then immediately latch for his first meal at the breast. Some women claim to have these experiences, but learning how to nourish my child from my body was a challenge. If I recall correctly, it was a full eight weeks before we really figured it out and he could latch on properly every time. Whew.
In the earliest of weeks, when the sleep deprivation fog was dense, I remember watching my son as he writhed and wailed but would not latch on. I looked down at him and said, “Open your eyes. I’m right here! All you have to do is just move forward. Everything you want is right here in front of you!” Finally, he found his way to me and silently nursed as I held him close.
Some weeks or months later I came across a passage in Frederick Buechner’s Telling Secrets that provided new depth to that exchange with my son. He is describing the constant busy-ness within us of thought and noise that keeps us from ever really encountering God. It’s true, is it not? We are busy people even when we move away from the computer or the cell phone (or the Netflix envelopes seducing me from across the room!). Our very minds are writhing and wailing with “the endless chatter of human thought,” Buechner writes.
He goes on to speak of times when he has attempted to truly be silent:
“I have been conscious but not conscious of anything, not even of myself. I have been surrounded by the whiteness of snow. I have heard the stillness that encloses all sounds stilled the way whiteness encloses all colors stilled, the way wordlessness encloses all words stilled. I have sensed the presence of a presence. I have felt a promise promised.”
It’s a difficult thing to capture, this presence. Elizabeth Gilbert, in last summer’s uber-popular Eat, Pray, Love, describes it as sitting in the palm of God’s hand. Buechner suggests we look to the Psalmist for a better image of this stillness; Psalm 131.
O Lord, my heart is not lifted up,
my eyes are not raised too high;
I do not occupy myself with things
too great and too marvelous for me.
But I have calmed and quieted my soul,
like a child quieted at its mother’s breast,
like a child that is quieted is my soul.
We are in need of mothering. We long to be calmed and quieted. Today is a sabbath day at our house, and I am enjoying silence and rest as I reflect, read, and listen to the birds outside. Open your eyes, my friends. Everything you want is right in front of you. May you be like a child at it’s mother’s breast on this spring day.
The Great Mother 