Reflections from Lake Three: Noise Meditation

Even at places like Lake Three there are plenty of opportunities to practice non-resistance. Take noise for instance. I love few things more than to listen to the sounds of an undisturbed forest, the wind through the trees, the buzzing of insects, the birds chirping, a squirrel chirring. Even so, last weekend I was irritated I’d forgotten my noise-cancelling headphones in case I wanted to listen to a little music. I got over it, because I can never listen to manmade music long there while nature’s symphony is playing.

At the next camp site a radio was playing…not loudly, I admit. If you’re going to listen to a radio in a place like Lake Three, you can’t play it softly enough for anyone else not to hear. I not only didn’t want to hear it, I simply could not understand why people could turn on their radios at a place like that for hours on end. Were they completely deaf to nature’s music? Why did they even bother to come?

Not everyone sees life the same way we do, nor hears it in the same way apparently. It wasn’t so much the actual noise as the difference in our outlooks that played most loudly through my mind. If I couldn’t accept people with radios, then why had I come to Lake Three?

The next morning a couple backed a trailer into a site just up the road. A short time later the shriek of a chainsaw exploded through the trees. I gritted my teeth. The idiot! Could these people not appreciate the quiet, the solitude, the churchliness of this place? This chainsaw was working an absolute desecration. Why couldn’t they bring their own firewood? This was a new challenge. Every time I seem to have taken a step, I find another, higher one.

A short time later my wife and I went for a walk into the deep woods a good mile and a half down The North Country Trail. On the way back, we heard the chainsaw again. “I sure hope he knocks that off,” my wife said.

“I’m practicing non-resistance,” I said. “I’m not going to let it bother me.” Then I added, “at least until this afternoon.”

Was I really accepting the noise? No, simply because I was not willing to accept it unconditionally. Whatever comes. Let it be. But at least I was making some progress. For the moment, at least, I was dealing with it. It wasn’t as if a chainsaw was unheard of in the forest. Fires burned constantly, and this man was not the first man to bring a chainsaw.

By the time we got back to Lake Three, all was quiet and peaceful again. No radios, no chainsaw. Just the birds and the breeze. His sawing was done. I later met this man, who turned out to be someone I liked very much. He was 73 and retired but in very good shape for his age. A first responder. He and his wife were leaving the day after we were, because Wednesday nights he was helping to build a house for Habitat for Humanity. To him, the sound of a saw probably carried a melody all its own. I’m sure he had no idea the same sound had seemed a desecration to me. It still rang in my ears but by then I was coming to terms with it.

Talking to him was part of my meditation on acceptance. I had judged him by it. This man and his saw had not bothered me so much as I had allowed the noise to intrude upon my interior silence. I had let my mind run with it. No matter what goes on around us, we can cultivate interior silence. I know this. I’ve known this for years, but that doesn’t mean it is easy. The next time a chainsaw erupts at Lake Three, I might not like it, but I will find it easier to lower the barriers of resistance. Certainly, I will hesitate to judge the person on the basis of noise he makes or on the basis of any other single action.

Today I’m off again to Lake Three with my son. There will be noise. We’re taking the boat to do more fishing. When I fish, Murphy’s Law reigns. If anything creates more resistance within me than noise, it is fishing. I’m sure this weekend will bring challenges of its own.

Reflections on 'A New Earth' from Lake Three

“In the forest, there is an incomprehensible order that to the mind looks like chaos. It is beyond the mental categories of good or bad. You cannot understand it through thought, but you can sense it when you let go of thought, become still and alert, and don’t try to understand or explain. Only then can you be aware of the sacredness of the forest.”

A New Earth – Eckhart Tolle

There never seems to be enough time. Even when I crawled out of my sleeping bag at six in the morning with the coffee pot ready and needing only heat. The birds had already been up for two hours. I read my breviary for ten minutes and put it down for the rest of the day. There is no internet at Lake Three, no DirecTV, no cell reception, no electricity, no running water, just a picnic table and a well-kept biffy provided by the Forest Service. I deliberately left my laptop at home. I scribbled in a leather-bound journal I’d not touched since the last time we were there. Two mornings we got up early enough to throw out fishing lines in hopes of a largemouth. No such luck.

I didn’t go to Lake Three just to read, but after fishing and hiking and Scrabble and being time, there still remained more time for reading than back home. I had big designs. I brought A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Positive Thinking by Norman Vincent Peale and The Painted Drum by Louise Erdrich. I didn’t plan to read them all, or in the case of the first two, re-read. I did plan to read generous segments of all of them. Instead I picked up Tolle’s book first, went through it cover-to-cover, and left Norman and Louise for another day.

Surely, Eckhart Tolle doesn’t need me to plug his book when he has Oprah; and there are probably more reviews of it than there are words in it. I’m not going to pretend to add anything new. In fact, the book itself adds very little to the main body of Tolle’s work which appears in The Power of Now, which I’ve also read and re-read and given copies of to my kids. However, in A New Earth he does explain his views of the ego and what he calls our “pain-body” in different ways, and suggests that through awakening (our first life purpose) will we find our secondary life purpose in the world of form. He further suggests that true hope for our planet lies in the collective awakening of human consciousness.

None of what Tolle offers us is terribly original. He draws deeply upon writings from the Bible, Buddhism, Hinduism and Sufism, which he weaves into a very Zen-like approach to life. Be aware of your thoughts, he says. Your thoughts are not you. Be on the alert for signs of the ego and your pain-body (collective memory) in your thoughts and feelings. They are not you, and so on. You can read things like this elsewhere. So why do I read Tolle and why did I take A New Earth to the middle of the Chequamegon National Forest?

I think Tolle’s genius lies in his ability to take a very Eastern way of thinking and express it in ways we Westerners not only can understand but can relate to. The teachings of Jesus and Saint Paul often lend themselves very nicely to Tolle’s point of view. For instance, Jesus said you must lose your life to find it. To Tolle, that means losing our egoic way of thinking. Awakening to our life’s purpose.

The signs about the world are ominous. Slowing economies, rising unemployment, skyrocketing commodities prices, shrinking investments, climate change, vanishing species, terrorism, fear of nuclear proliferation. My 89-year old mother remarked to me the other day that people at her retirement complex were talking about “Armageddon.” A lot of people are wondering what life will be like for their children, grandchildren and great grandchildren.

It’s tough stuff to ignore. What is so refreshing about escaping to Lake Three is its psychological remoteness from the world. Yes, there is radio reception, but I have little patience for listening to music there, much less the noise of the news. The sounds of the forest are enough. I can begin to forget. The trees don’t care about global warming; they’re doing their part. The birds don’t care about the price of oil. The fish don’t care about terrorism. I can begin to focus on the ego and identify the pain-body, and yes they are there. I can begin to focus on how they affect my thinking and emotions. I can at least begin, again, to learn how to live in the present. There is fishing meditation and walking meditation and even bug and noise meditation. There are challenges even at Lake Three, but one is not overwhelmed by them. I can begin to lose myself.

Perhaps the greatest challenge is the practice of nonresistance. According to Tolle, “nonresistance is the key to the greatest power in the universe.” The practice begins internally with accepting each situation as it is. When I read the headlines every morning, it is usually with a judgmental eye. God, are they really killing aid workers in Somalia? How can oil cost so much? How can we possibly balance the budget with the economy in the tank? I’m glad to get away from such stuff, so I can try to practice nonresistance on easier things. A chainsaw, mosquitoes, yapping dogs, a balky fishing line, a million little, almost-manageable things. Acceptance. Things are as they are. Tolle quotes Shakespeare too: “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”

It is not a matter of cultivating only pleasant, optimistic thoughts; Tolle is not into “the power of positive thinking.” In fact, he’s into thinking only insofar as it becomes necessary to live in a world of form. Tolle is into being without passing judgment. Of course, nonresistance does not mean doing nothing about the evil we perceive in the world. Inner acceptance does not mean indifference. It simply (or not so simply) means not squandering precious energy indulging in judgment.

I took A New Earth to Lake Three because I am a firm believer that survival of our planet is not primarily a matter of politics, economics or science. It is a matter of spiritual awakening that must begin with each one of us. Just today Pope Benedict XVI was quoted at CNN.com during his trip to Australia: "In so many of our societies, side by side with material prosperity, a spiritual desert is spreading: an interior emptiness, an unnamed fear, a quiet sense of despair." The pontiff advocated "a new age in which hope liberates us from the shallowness, apathy and self-absorption which deadens our souls and poisons our relationships.” Tolle puts it another way. As we learn to identify our ego and our egoic thinking, we also begin to see the dissolution of our self-indulgent sense of separation from all things.

As a Christian, I am not necessarily offended by anything Eckhart Tolle has to say. When it comes to doctrine, I am decidedly open minded. However, if you wish to read a more strictly Christian assessment of Tolle’s book, well-written and erudite, I would commend you to a review at Greg Boyd’s blog, Random Reflections.

The battle for a New Earth has begun. It is not being fought in Afghanistan or Iraq or Washington or The Hague. It is being fought within each one of us, with each breath, with each moment of our awareness.

The Money-Changers

Man will not be content to drive away the money-changers from the temple of his soul until he realizes that it is a Holy of Holies.

OK, I probably would not have called this site “The Silent Life” if I did not intend to address the subject of silence once in a while. I hate noise, both external and internal. We live in the middle of the woods where it is often quite peaceful and still. I have come to think a lot about what is noise and what is not. First, let us de-emphasize the notion of noise we can hear with our ears. I’m not here to promote monastic observances of silence…although the human voice can be one of the noisiest, most cacaphonous sounds in all creation, especially our own. Most of us do not live in monasteries, and most of us have little control over the roar of our everyday lives. It can be deafening.

To me, a bird singing outside my window or the air soughing through the trees is not noise. Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata” is not noise. On the other hand, the headlines pulsing quietly off my computer screen, Oil Prices Skyrocket, Iran Test-Fires Missiles, Market Down Again, sound like trains colliding. That is internal noise. Even without such stimulation, our minds graciously present us with our own mental movies; and most of the time they are just useless, godless, energy-sucking, anxiety-producing junk. Worse still, this kind of noise is often harder to escape than the daily assault upon our ears.

That is, if we even try to escape. Most of us have become so anesthetized to the everyday din that we scarcely notice it. We’re like sponges, passive, soaking it all in from without and from within, oblivious to the corrosion it’s causing in our souls. We are deaf, yet still listening for the voice of God.

Only when we begin to observe interior silence, can we begin to pray as God intended. Only in this silence can we begin to know our true nature. Only in silence can we begin to know God. The works of Thomas Merton are replete with references to silence. In his Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander Merton quotes the writer, Julien Green: “Religion is not understood. Those who wish themselves pious, in order to admire themselves in this state, are made stupid by religion. What is needed is to lose ourselves completely in God; what is needed is perfect silence, supernatural silence. Pious talk has something revolting about it.”

To Eckhart Tolle observing external silence promotes stillness within. “The Unmanifested is present in the world as silence. This is why it has been said that nothing in the world is so like God as silence.”[1]

Father Raoul Plus observed that “man will not be content to drive away the money-changers from the temple of his soul until he realizes that it is a Holy of Holies – not a house of traffic, but in very truth the house of God.”[2] Once we realize this, we can begin the practice of interior silence; and only after we begin that can we begin the practice of the presence of God.

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[1] The Power of Now.

[2] How to Pray Always

Saint Anne's Rosary

"As we walked back out to the parking lot, I was suddenly overwhelmed by the sense that something miraculous had just happened."

A number of years ago, when our kids were still young enough to have free time during the summer, we took a trip out east to New York and Vermont. I am still not a comfortable traveler, and until that time I had never been east of Ohio. I didn’t know what to expect except more traffic and more confusing tangles of highway. What were we going to do about money cutting across Ontario? As time for departure approached, I grew more apprehensive. This was supposed to be a vacation, and I was dreading it. Nevertheless, when the time came, we packed the Suburban to the gunnels and took off through the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, across the scary heights of the Mackinac Bridge, through the Lower Peninsula, across Ontario and on to New York.

Not without mild adventure, of course. I waited in line for a half hour at a small bank in Michigan to get some Canadian money, not realizing there was a currency exchange just across the border. I felt really stupid having worried about that. We spent about ten dollars at a McDonald’s the entire way across Ontario before we got lost trying to find the bridge to Niagara Falls, New York. We drove around in circles several times wondering how we could miss a bridge. At a stop sign we were struck in the rear end by a Geo Tracker carrying two young New Yorkers as lost as we were. We barely felt the blow, and the kid was visibly relieved when I saw no damage to the Suburban. No one needed the complication of an accident in Canada. The next time around we found the entrance to the bridge, which was shrouded in construction scaffolding and canvas. Our return to American soil seemed like a blessed event.

As it turned out, our trip was blessed in more ways than one. Even though we merely skirted the Adirondacks, we found the beauty of outstate New York and Vermont to be breathtaking. A sense of history is everywhere in signs, markers and events. The people are proud of their heritage and friendlier to travelers than almost anywhere I’ve been. We enjoyed the rustic peacefulness of Cooperstown, which is worth the visit even if you don’t go to the Baseball Hall of Fame. We stopped at Fort William Henry, and although this wasn’t a religious pilgrimage of any kind, we also visited the shrines of The North American Martyrs and the Blessed Kateri Tekakwitha, the “Lilly of the Mohawks.”

We left home prepared to camp as much as we could but didn’t find convenient opportunities until we crossed into the quiet hills of Vermont, although time seemed to be running short and we’d left much unseen in New York. We pitched our tent for two nights a short distance north of Bennington and then for two nights at a state park on one of the northern islands of Lake Champlain. Before we’d left, I had thoughts we might go as far as Maine and then wind our way back through the Adirondacks. That was no longer going to be possible, insofar as we only had two days left before we had to make the long drive back to northern Wisconsin. To be sure, our leisurely pace had left me more relaxed than expected, if a little unfulfilled. We had also, somehow, escaped the expected crowds. I’d been wondering for days “where was everybody?” I was used to more tourist traffic many places within an hour of home. Were we not within a few hours driving of many more millions of people? Either easterners didn’t travel as much, or they took for granted the beauty in their own backyard.

Our first full day on the islands of northern Lake Champlain we went for a drive to see what we could see. Our wanderings of course took us to another shrine, Saint Anne’s Shrine on Isle La Motte, Vermont. There we found ourselves in a shady, pastoral setting on Lake Champlain that befitted the peacefulness of our trip. The grounds were groomed and immaculate. It was the weekend of July 26^th, the Feast of Saint Anne, so the place was full of people and things going on. Masses were being held in a beautiful outdoor pavilion. The shrine was one of the few places on the trip that had attracted a crowd. I found it comforting in a way.

Eventually we found ourselves in the gift shop where I wasn’t looking for anything in particular. I picked up an inexpensive pair of sunglasses similar to a pair I’d worn for years. I lingered over the rosaries, in particular a beautiful rosary of olivewood beads. All my rosaries had long ago broken or disappeared. The olivewood rosary was far from the most expensive rosary there, but one could have not have bought the rosary without a matching olivewood box that sat next to it. The shop did not accept credit cards, and the rosary and box would have put a dent in my dwindling supply of cash. I must have stood there for ten minutes. To me it was the most beautiful rosary I had ever seen. With great regret, I paid for the sunglasses and left.

Lunch was being served in the main building, and so we made our way there through the shade of the trees and a cool lake breeze. We stood in line buffet style and filled our trays, while I stood there wondering how we had found our way to such a place. I thought of the rosary left behind. It was not yet too late to change my mind. But no, we had another day there on the lake and three hard days driving after that. I was not sophisticated in the ways of ATM’s and other ways to get cash. Still, the thought of the rosary would not desert me. Something told me I would deeply regret leaving Saint Anne’s Shrine without the olivewood rosary. The struggle continued through lunch and into the perfect July air outside. I could not leave that rosary behind, I simply couldn’t.

We returned to the gift shop where I took the rosary and matching box into my hands. The girl behind the register matter-of-factly reached for some change atop the register and offered it to me. “I overcharged you a little for those sunglasses,” she said, as if she’d been expecting me. She held no more than seventy cents in her hand. How strange, I thought at first, to have the change waiting there on top for me, a whole seventy cents; how strange to act as if my return for seventy cents had been such an absolute certainty. As I paid for the rosary and box and we again wandered out onto the peaceful grounds of Saint Anne’s Shrine, the strangeness had only begun to settle in.

I have never been a person to doubt the existence of miracles or the miraculous, but neither have I been a person who expects to see any evidence of the same in his lifetime. I am an ordinary sinner, and saints just don’t bother with people like me. But as we walked back out to the parking lot, I was suddenly overwhelmed by the sense that something miraculous had indeed just happened. As if Saint Anne herself had wanted me to have the rosary I now carried, as if she had called me to it. Tears welled into my eyes, which I wiped away as quickly as possible, lest my family see and think that I was losing it. I had to stop and catch my breath. How do you act normally at such a time? I don’t think I’ve ever known such true humility as in that moment. Is it only in the presence of God that we realize how truly insignificant we really are?

From that moment on, I have taken Saint Anne’s rosary whenever I travel. The segment of our trip home across Canada was even less eventful and more pleasant than the first. Saint Anne is the patron saint of Canada.

Have I ever thought that the clerk had simply set the money aside to balance her register? Have I ever thought her expectation of my return was simply a display of a fastidious personality? Have I ever thought that it was all just a curious happening devoid of any saintly intervention? Of course. The skeptic in me is still quite alive and well. Do I believe it? I suppose one would truly have to understand the effect the rosary had on me from the first to understand that, no, for once I do not believe in the natural explanations. Something overwhelming happened to me at Saint Anne’s Shrine on Isle La Motte. There I believe Saint Anne presented me with a rosary, and I believe she hears all our prayers.