The Slow Way Newsletter: The Wild Hawk of the Mind
a weekly newsletter for all the frantic strivers, serial doers & weary achievers
unhurried thoughts
The mind's obsessive running in tight circles generates and sustains the anguish that forms the mental cage in which we live much of our lives--or what we take to be our lives. . . It makes us believe we are separate from God. God then becomes an object somewhere over there in the distance. . . It makes us believe that we are alone, shameful, stupid, afraid, unlovable. We believe this lie, and our life becomes a cocktail party of posturing masquerade in order to hide the anxiety and ignorance of who we truly are.
Martin Laird, Into the Silent Land
The Wild Hawk of the Mind
I read Martin Laird's words this week and then spent the past couple of days thinking on that cocktail party metaphor. The posturing, the fear that places us in the middle of so much noise and dresses us up all pretty. How much of our life is this masquerade of trying to hide ourselves? God walking in the garden, calling for Adam and Eve. Where are you? We saw that we were naked and we hid.
Always hiding, we humans. We see that we are naked (vulnerable, uncertain, afraid) and we dress ourselves in glitter and tip back sparkling drinks. What if the cocktail party, the masquerade of power and opinion, success and status, gossip and comfort, is the metaphor I’ve been looking for all this time? Maybe the chaos of our culture of striving: performance and speed and the pursuit of comfort is not best understood as a speeding train, or a hamster on a wheel. Maybe our culture of striving is best understood as a never-ending cocktail party? A blob of mindless chatter, moving us in its orb like an amoeba. Always the noise, the shallow conversations, the cover of pretense. How often do we, do the people around us, actually reveal the truth of ourselves to one another?
And the cocktail party metaphor can also run deeper. It represents not only the way our culture interacts with itself, but also the chaos of our own minds. Minds that were meant to be free---wide and wild spaces---now weighed down by tight enclosed walls, the voices of our past and present, voices of our failures, our fears, our insecurities, crammed shoulder to shoulder with glasses in their hands, staring at one another and shouting above the background noise. No wonder our minds are tired.
To reject the cultural construct that asks us to hide beneath shallow ideas and relationships, the construct that tells us our life is found in the orb of noise and striving, maybe we first need to recognize the cocktail party that exists in our own minds. There is so much noise to be turned down inside before we attempt to quiet the outside.
Sometimes, prayer can become another voice babbling in the brain, instead of the way to quiet. We give ourselves so many rules for acceptable prayers, but sometimes only silence is needed. In fact, sometimes silence is needed more than anything.
In that same chapter of Into the Silent Land, Laird quotes the poet R.S. Thomas’ description of the “wild hawk of the mind.” I keep coming back to this idea of a wild hawk mind. It sounds harsh and dangerous, but also beautiful. That's the mind I want--the alertness, the intensity, the spaciousness. I want a wild-hawk-mind, not a cocktail party.
Could the silence of the presence of God be the way out of the cocktail party? The way into the space of the hawk, wild and deliberate. Silent and powerful and free?
a slow practice
Take ten minutes to consider your mind's cocktail party. Take a piece of paper or a journal and imagine the various conversations that go on in your mind throughout the day. Try to pull them apart. You can even give them names or draw them. Imagine the voice that criticizes your body, the character that judges your eating choices. Imagine the voice that is disappointed in your failure to work out, or the one that reminds you of your relationship failures, or repeats negative criticisms from childhood. Imagine these party-goers and make note of them, separating each voice from one another. (Note: this cannot be accomplished in just one 10 minute setting! In fact, the voices in our minds run deep, sometimes all the way to childhood trauma. So be gentle with yourself, and seek out a therapist if you feel overwhelmed by all the voices speaking at once.)
Once you’ve imagined some of the party-goers in your mind, take a second to ask them to be quiet. Imagine someone turning down the music and the hum of voices coming to a stop. Now, imagine a place completely different from this party. Picture a wide open landscape, whatever sort of space speaks to you. It could be a spot by the sea, or a forest, or the plains. Now imagine you are a hawk flying high over that quiet space. What do you experience there?
Take a moment to ask what God’s dreams are for your mind. What might it look like to be freed from the cocktail party, to step into a spacious, wild place?