Standby

A year without a word may seem counterproductive for a product that supposedly has a shelf life measured in minutes, not months. But this production has been stalled at Act Two, Scene One, the better part of a year. Partly by procrastination, at least for the first quarter; and then gradually, and more assuredly, by intent.

Sabbaticals are usually seen as a time to stand apart from the ordinary commerce of your daily life, a time carved out to study, assess, reflect, and refresh. Then return to reengage whatever pastime or responsibility you needed relief from in the first place. Who takes a sabbatical from a virtual wayside on life’s expressway. I guess I do.




Last April at O’Hare I was on standby for a flight to Camp Allen Texas for four hours. An unplanned, and, at first, underappreciated four hours. I spent the first hour trying to cut my idle time to a minimum, and the rest realizing it was more of a pardon than a sentence.

Given a choice, which is more precious: our time (our being) or our status (our standing)? In this era of social media and 24/7, standing apart is easily outshined by standing out. No one on Facebook or My Space or Blogspot or LinkedIn or any other avenue of self-expression is laboring incognito, even under a pseudonym. We want to be noticed. We want to read. We want to be affirmed. And so we post, telling the world—or our tribe—what we plan, what we have done, or what we have lost.

Tagging and tweeting and texting can be lifelines—as we have seen with the world’s response to the cry from Haiti. Or avenues for forming or feeding community. Or just diversions from doing our laundry, or alternatives to living with the stillness, learning to just be.

So for a little over a year I have chosen to be on standby; standing down and standing apart, letting the remnants of last year’s trauma lie fallow, while attending to other fields and avenues. This is not in the footsteps so much of Thomas Merton’s epiphany in blindly picking a line from the Gospel of Luke: “Behold, thou shalt be silent.” It is, though, in concert with the Cistercian principle of avoiding unnecessary speaking, a practice that opens pathways for prayer, and clearings for presence.

I cannot point to any profound epiphanies during this recess from Tidings. That should not be surprising since the point is to leave a place fallow, untended, untilled. And it was a limited sabbatical. My keyboard was quite active on other accounts.

Everything that needed to be said in our loss of our companions, Suki and Milo, was said a year ago. More is being written in the embrace of new companions, Shiro and Misty.


It’s time once more to stand up. We are cleared for takeoff.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear the lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

The Lake Isle of Innisfree, William Butler Yeats