C.M. Rivers

"The point of being an artist is that you may live." ~ Sherwood Anderson


Stillness

Like so many things, it comes when I have given in, given up the search, released the desire, turned my attention elsewhere.  It comes in crumpled-up moments – in splintered, fickle doses.

It’s as if my expectation of it is the very thing that prevents it.  I might be on the town running errands, ticking them off the list one by one, when something else happens, something unplanned, something unscheduled, a canceled appointment that cracks open a half-hour like a chest of impossible jewels.

This is how it comes to me.  Not on my knees begging, no, but rather when I have laid down the obsession gently on the ground and carried on.

Yet even then, stillness (like an alley cat or a bird or a whale or a poem or sun on a cloudy day) might show itself, or it might not.

 



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