Barbara Hurd: from "Refugium," Pt. 2

"Those who are fond of retreats--writers, ecstatics, parents with young children--often comment on the silence such time away allows.  Silence becomes something present, almost palpable.  The task shifts from keeping the world at a safe decibel distance to letting more of the world in.  Thomas Aquinas said that beauty arrests motion.  He meant, I think, that in the presence of something gorgeous or sublime, we stop our nervous natterings, our foot twitchings and restless tongues.  Whatever that fretful hunger is, it seems momentarily filled in the presence of beauty.  To Aquinas's wisdom I'd add that silence arrests flight, that in its refuge' the need to flee the chaos of noise diminishes.  We let the world creep closer, we drop to our knees, as if to let the heart, like a small animal, get its legs on the ground."

-- Barbara Hurd --
from "Refugium"
Summer: A Spiritual Autobiography of the Season

Silence is rapidly becoming eligible of being listed as an endangered species today.  Everything seems to ring or ding or whistle at us.  It's impossible to get away from the siren calls of mobile phones, and I don't even have one.  It's getting harder and harder to walk through a parking lot without having some vehicle warning us to back off, or else.  Restaurants now seem to be designed to magnify noise, forcing patrons to shout at someone sitting across the table, just a few feet away.

But what's truly frightening is that I know people who don't like to leave the city because it's too quiet out there.  Isaac Asimov wrote a novel, Caves of Steel, in which people now lived in huge cities that were covered over.  They never saw the sky,  All lighting was artificial.  As a consequence the population was agoraphobic, afraid to enter a large open space.  Are we becoming afraid of silence today?  Are we becoming afraid of being alone with only our own thoughts and nothing to distract us? 

Barbara Hurd: from "Refugium," Pt 1

Barbara Hurd has some interesting thoughts on retreats or refuges, a place to get away from it all so that we can get a better look at ourselves and the world around us, free from noise or distractions. Some retreats last only a short time: a few hours perhaps, while others may go on for a weekend or even a week or two. Sometimes though, a retreat may go on indefinitely.  Michael is a friend of hers who is busy "dismantling his identity as a artist living by the edge of a swamp."

"We talk for hours on the boardwalk at Cranesville.  Michael isn't going into hiding; he's retreating from a path that wasn't headed toward what, for him, is being fully human.  He's not sure what that means except a  quiet letting go, a deliberate choice to go toward some kind of refuge that nourishes his spirit.  All the great spiritual leaders have done it,  from Buddha to Christ to Gandhi.  They've withdrawn for a few days or weeks to sit in caves and under trees, to wander in deserts, alone, packing as little as possible into their knapsacks.  They're after, I think, some moments of trackless quiet, a chance to blur the footprints, the sense of having been someplace, of having someplace to get to.  A chance to see what happens when the past and the future stop tugging on the leads and the present opens like a well."

-- Barbara Hurd --
"Refugium"
from Summer: A Spiritual Biography of the Season



"A chance to see what happens when the past and the future stop tugging on the leads and the present opens like a well."

This is a central theme in many Eastern traditions, including Buddhism and Taoism.  We should avoid the trap of living in the past or living for the future, and instead, concentrate on living in the present, the Now.  We should focus on what we are doing now and on what is going on around us Now.


"Trust no future, however pleasant!
 Let the dead past bury its dead!
 Act, - act in the living Present!

-- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow --
from "A Psalm of Life"

Barbara Hurd: Some kind words for swamps

".  .  .We love high drama in this country, mountain peaks and soap operas.  They offer us something to tilt our lives toward--that triumph of ascent, that heart-pounding eye-to-eye intensity, that feeling of being wildly alive.  Our nature aesthetics sound like movie reviews.  We thrill to the surprising twist in the road that reveals the vast panorama, the unexpected waterfall.  We canonize beauty that can be framed on the walls, in the camera, or on the postcard.
     To love a swamp, however, is to love what is muted and marginal, what exists in the shadows, what shoulders its way out of mud and scurries along the damp edges of what is most commonly praised.  And sometimes its invisibility is a blessing.  Swamps and bogs are places of transition and wild growth, breeding grounds, experimental labs  where organisms and ideas have the luxury of being out of the spotlight, where the imagination can mutate and mate, send tendrils into and out of the water.  It should come as no surprise that the most common carnivorous plants are found in wetlands.  Here there is room for the thought not fully formed to stretch, roll over, poke its eyes above water.  Here is the valley of split-pea soup where what floats like a chunk of ham might lift its meaty head out of the muck and haul itself onto the log next to you. blinking in the sunshine."

-- Barbara Hurd --
from Spring: A Spiritual Autobiography of the Season



I must confess that I'm one of those high drama lovers that Hurd writes of and who seldom spends any time contemplating the virtues of a bog.  And, I never thought of comparing our subconscious where those half-formed ideas germinate and play  to a swamp or bog, but it does seem to fit somehow.   Some of those ideas probably should never escape from the bog, but there are others that should be nurtured for awhile before being exposed to the harsh realities of  the outside world.