The Illusion of Stillness
In a world where motion is the rule, perhaps the best you can do is to just hang on
Alone in the dark, I often use poetry to keep me company, contemplating a poem, or a line of a poem, as I wait for the hope of northern lights. Tonight, I am thinking of “Cascadilla Falls” by A. R. Ammons.
In the poem, Ammons too is walking alone, below a waterfall and picks up a stone, “thinking all its motions into it” he says. “The 800 mph earth spin/the 190-million-mile yearly displacement around the sun/the overriding grand haul of the galaxy/ with the 30,000 mph of where the sun is going.”
Overwhelmed, he drops the stone. “Oh I do not know where I am going, that I can live my life by this single creek,” the poem ends.
I do know where I am going, living my life by this big lake: the north end of Meyers Beach. So, I pick up a stone to keep me company in the dark, trying to think all the motions into this Lake Superior night swirling with motion.
To my left as I walk down the beach, the drumbeat of waves on the lake. To the right, the sawing of the wind through the trees. The sand crumbles beneath my feet, my legs scissor in the dark, and overhead: northern lights are dancing.
Northern lights, or the aurora borealis, are caused by waves of energy from the sun colliding with the elements in the Earth’s upper atmosphere at speeds of up to 45 million miles an hour. The color depends on what elements that energy interacts with at what altitudes - green for oxygen, red for nitrogen. But whatever the color, what we see is simply the pure beauty of motion.
Add those numbers to the other dance steps that we exist with here on this planet. The rock we live on is spinning - faster at the equator, slowing as you near the poles. Here in Wisconsin, it spins about 740 miles an hour. Then there is the fact that the whole earth roars along at some 67,000 miles an hour in our orbit around the sun to complete the 584 million mile journey in a year (365.256 days), motions we don’t feel because gravity is holding us, and everything else including our atmosphere, together so that we move at the same speed relative to our surroundings. We all dance together, so to speak, giving us the illusion of standing as still as stones.
But we are not stones and even those stones are not still. Stillness is an illusion. All my life I have sought stillness, thinking therein would lie the peace at the core of the chaos. Perhaps that was a mistake - seeking stillness in a world of motion may be the wrong approach. Perhaps we should be seeking equilibrium instead, a motion relative to our surroundings. Stillness is unobtainable when “Everything is flowing -- going somewhere,” as John Muir once said, “animals and so-called lifeless rocks as well as water... While the stars go streaming through space pulsed on and on forever like blood...in Nature's warm heart.” Think of the chaos of waves caused by a rock set still in the stream versus the grace of a leaf moving with the current.
With that rock still in my hand, I step to the edge of a small creek flowing out on to the sand near the northern edge of Meyers Beach. Reflecting in the aurora flickering overhead, the small stream glimmers like the flow of light, like motion itself. Suddenly, the dance does not seem hypothetical any more. It is all around me, within me, in front of me: I step in.
I feel the faint tug of the current pushing against my boots, the slight vibration of the water through the sand like wind through the pine needles..
It is like stepping on to a dance floor with music I’ve always known was there but never truly heard. Not just standing idly by observing it all but jumping directly into the dance, acknowledging and accepting motion as the true state of existence. The stars spin. The waves crash. My breath moves in and out of my lungs like the wind. I am dizzy with the spin and swirl of it all, the motion of the creek around my feet, until I lose my footing in this world and feel afloat in it all, as if I am drifting in space, which, of course, I am. We all are.
I click the shutter and crawl out of the stream to sit on the beach, gripping the Earth with my hands, digging my feet into the sand, looking for an anchor to hold me to the earth, an understanding to hold me to the present, and trying to catch my breath in the dark.
— Jeff Rennicke (all photography by the author unless otherwise noted).