The Quiet Places

The last clusters of brown leaves cling tentatively to stark branches. The weight of a cold rain drives them down one by one, to join a mounting carpet of brown that covers everything.

Fall has always been my favorite season. But it has been years since I sat at a kitchen table and watched this transformation so intimately--when death claims colors' radiance and strips nature to the bare essentials. The trees, with trunks all sleek and black and mossy from days of rain, get starker every day.

There is a severe drama to this dance of death, when color is drained, and life lets go and spirals down to sodden ground. The snow hasn't yet blanketed the landscape with new possibilities, and spring's vital and verdant hues are months away.

I sit by a kitchen window in the mountains of western North Carolina. The leaves slowly spiraling outside seem like so many illusions and securities now gone.

The past year has been one of unearthing memories, counting life's wounds, groping my way through a long tunnel of pain that seemed at points unending. It was a time of facing fear on the streets that have been my home for 15 years; of finding that loneliness had crept into intimate spaces and sadness had overwhelmed my capacity for celebration.

We are coached in this culture to avoid pain. I looked in vain for tidy little spaces to put mine, out of sight and heart. But, as a friend reminded me in the thick of it, "The only way to the other side is through the pain."

She was right, of course. There are no shortcuts. Healing always comes at great price.

I AM IN THE mountains for a few months to continue the healing. There is a book waiting to be written, and that will occupy much of my time. I have brought along my watercolors and am teaching myself to play the flute. The gorgeous forests that surround me have already beckoned me for hikes on crisp, clear, glorious days. The senses have come alive.

This time will eventually end. I know that it is a rare interlude, a gift that the circumstances of my life allow me to partake of for this moment.

A letter awaited my arrival here, from a friend who is a physician back home in inner-city Washington. He wrote, "I'm convinced from my own experiences that this work we're engaged in has a way of taking our own weaknesses and pain and bringing them to center stage....One of the binds that we get into is believing that we really can't just take time off. Our troubles seem somehow so trivial compared to Justice and Truth and Peace. But the only way we fight for justice, truth, and peace is to live lives of the same--and that sometimes involves going away to the quiet places for a while."

These are words that, today, my heart can embrace. It wasn't always so. Over the years too many warnings about burnout and finding balance and taking time for quiet went unheeded, driven away by the incessant belief that--if I only worked hard enough--I (with a little help from my friends) could indeed change the world. Now I know it is a lifetime work simply to change me.

These mountains are a gigantic quiet place for me for a time, like arms of God that embrace and cradle me in solitude and solace. But I--like all of us--will need to find the quiet places in the midst of daily life. The personal spaces must be uncovered among the demands of work, family, community, and the long list of commitments that we carry around. The challenge is to rest in the arms of God through prayer, stillness, and communion with friends. And so the journey continues....

Joyce Hollyday was associate editor of Sojourners when this article appeared.