My Name Is Iden | Searching for stillness
- Published: January 3, 2025
I just woke up. I was reading in my hammock. I don’t remember falling asleep, but I do remember waking up, so it must be true that I was sleeping.
I like hammocks. I do most of my writing in hammocks, although I am not actually writing this in the hammock. I can’t. I don’t have anything to write with. That’s on purpose.
I am trying to learn to relax, to be still. So I am actually just thinking these things from within the hammock — but I think there might be something to these thoughts I am thinking, so I will do my best to remember them. If I’m successful in that, then I will write them down later. If you are reading them, then I must have been successful.
It’s an early fall day — a perfect hammock day. There are clouds in the sky, but it isn’t cloudy. The air is cool, but the sun is warm and the breeze is just enough to give me a subtle push every now and then. It’s not surprising that I drifted off.
It’s the sway of a hammock that soothes. It mimmicks the womb, so they say. I actually don’t know if they really say that, or who “they” even is, but it seems right to me.
I think the womb is what I came here to find. It’s what I’ve come to all the places that I’ve come and gone from to find. Perhaps this hammock is in fact a womb simulator, but it is a crude one at best.
The sway of a hammock is not the movement of a parent. The warmth of the sun is not the steady state of the uterus that I am trying to substitute it for. The same breeze that imparts a subtle sway to me also pushes the branches and rushes the clouds past. It takes only an errant tree limb or wandering cloud to remove my sun-fueled comfort and, when that happens, I am just an adult laying outside in the chill of an early fall day.
It isn’t perfect, and that is just as well. It is not a physical womb substitute that I am in search of. I didn’t really come here to my hammock looking for physical comfort. What I wanted was emotional comfort. I came here seeking simplicity, that primordial simplicity of the womb.
The memory of that time isn’t kept in the part of my brain that holds words or pictures. How could it be? I didn’t know words or pictures. I only knew feeling. It is the memory of that feeling that I have chased my entire life. That is why I am here trying to feel relaxed. Trying to feel simple. Or, maybe, hoping to simply feel.
This is a lot to think about. There are more thoughts drifting across my gray matter than there are clouds drifting across this lovely early fall sky and they shift and change just as quickly. My mind isn’t a simple place. Life isn’t a simple thing. Not for me, anyway, and I am sure I am not alone in that.
There is a reason why words like “natal,” “native,” “naive” and “nativity” all pull the cloud of our thought into similar pictures for us to muse upon. They all are built for the same purpose: to try to capture the simple comfort that we all felt, and all left, for this life of compounding experience and contorted contemplation.
There was a time when I knew so little that I didn’t know about “little.” There was a time when I existed in a world without comparison. But then I woke up. I woke up to the light and the noise and the complications of thought.
Now, I think about warmth because I know cold. Now, I think about quiet because I know noise. That is waking. That is living. The unceasing learning, experiencing, trying, failing, forgetting, regretting, searching, hoping, wishing, and never, ever, ever, being still.
I want so badly to be still.
I remember feeling still. At least, I think I do. Deep inside me, I remember it, and I miss it. I long for it.
I think we all do.
Maybe we are all searching. All of us looking for new relationships, better careers, healthier diets. All of us just hopping into and out of our hammocks, and asking the clouds why it all seems so overwhelming.
But movement is life and, while we live, we will sway. We will shift. We will warm and cool. We will drift off and wake up and always be wondering what we missed while we slept. Always wondering if it was worth it.
I don’t know any of that for sure, but it seems right to me. Perhaps, I am trying too hard. Maybe I am searching for the wrong thing. After all, I don’t need to find stillness. Stillness will find me. Eventually it will. It will find all of us. Maybe what I am missing is patience.
Maybe I should accept that being alive is a complicated way to be. Maybe, after the stillness has returned to me, I will long for that chaos, for all of the pictures and words that I learned, the confusing thoughts that I thought, and all those conflicted feelings that I felt.
I have been lying here for a while now. I should get up. The clouds that I knew have all moved on and, I think, maybe, I have a lot to write down.
*The author is an artist and writer. She lives in Yellow Springs with her wife and three children. You can follow her work at mynameisiden.com.
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