Step away from the firehose of evil, rebuild your resolve
This morning. The wonderful usual. Glad to wake up. Wake the dog. Walk the dog. Let dog sniff to her heart’s content. That’s her major sensory intake. That’s her vision. Now she stares at me. My face lit by the Chromebook screen. I drink terrific coffee. She naps. I type.
I am working on multiple Substack letters. They are about The Resistance. The next one will probably be about messaging. It’s not enough to be anti-fascist. It’s not enough to complain about the authoritarian lawbreaking. We will need to do more than rebel and complain. We will need to message a better way. A message of hope for a better American life.
But today, I share what I think is equally important. If you are not in the mood. I get it. I am in a fighting rage several times a day. Maybe come back to this post when you are exhausted.
But if you are ready, please read the post below from Dino Alonso. It changed the trajectory of my day and added to my superpowers – we all have them.
Rest and Reflection. Rejuvenation. Restoring our energy and enthusiasm. Rebuilding our resolve. Requires taking a break from the battles. And once recharged, we can resume the good fight and win.
So take a deep breath. Dump your thoughts. Read about being yourself. Not a reaction. Not a warrior. Not now. Just for a while. Time for battle later.
WHERE THE QUIET THINGS LIVE
—-A homily on stillness, interior peace, and soul-preserving silence in a world of noise
Lets come together.
Not with your feet. With your breath.
With the part of you that’s weary from holding it all together, from reacting, from replying, from always being on.
Come closer in the way a leaf drifts down to a forest floor and makes no sound.
Because today I want to talk about silence.
Not the absence of sound, but the presence of stillness.
Not retreat, but return.
Not an escape from the world, but a re-entry into yourself.
There is a place where the quiet things live.
And too many of us haven’t visited in years.
Not because we don’t want to.
But because we’ve forgotten the path.
I carry noise in my bones.
Not just the noise of machines and screens, but the noise of judgment, of demand, of a thousand imagined audiences watching every move.
And some days, I wonder: what if the soul doesn’t shout?
What if the soul only ever whispers?
“Be like the fox,” Wendell Berry once wrote,
“who makes more tracks than necessary, some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.”
What if resurrection isn’t a thunderclap but a hush?
What if peace doesn’t arrive with marching bands and hashtags but instead curls itself into the corner of the room like a cat, waiting for you to sit down long enough for it to find your lap?
There is a discipline to stillness.
It is not passive.
It is not easy.
It requires the ferocity of restraint, the courage to not respond, to not lash out, to not react in kind.
Stillness is not withdrawal.
Stillness is war fought on the battlefield of your nervous system.
And it is love.
Stillness is how you choose not to pass your pain on.
Stillness is how you hear what you actually believe before someone else tells you what to believe.
I have found, in the soft underbrush of my own healing,
that quiet is the native tongue of the soul.
And every time I let the noise of the world colonize me,
I forget how to speak it.
So I return.
Not always gracefully.
Sometimes I crawl.
But I return.
And in that return I rediscover the quiet things:
The way light falls across the floor in late afternoon.
The crinkle of a page turning.
The release that comes from an exhale held too long.
The memory of someone I loved who once sat with me and said nothing, and somehow that silence said everything.
You don’t need a monastery.
You don’t need a mountain.
You don’t need a sabbatical.
You need a corner, a minute, a single breath you don’t give away.
Carve out one moment.
Not for consumption. Not for commentary.
Just to be whole again, without explanation.
Find that place where the quiet things live.
And guard it like sacred ground.
Because it is.
“Only in silence the word, only in dark the light,
only in dying life: bright the hawk’s flight on the empty sky.”
— Ursula K. Le Guin
“In an age of speed, nothing could be more invigorating than going slow.
In an age of distraction, nothing more luxurious than paying attention.”
— Pico Iyer
I don’t have easy answers.
But I know this:
The world doesn’t need more noise.
It needs more souls who’ve made peace with their own.
Let the quiet find you.
Let it fill the cracks.
Let it speak where words fail.
You were never meant to shout over the world just to hear yourself think.
You were meant to sit beneath a tree of your own making
and remember that stillness was never the absence of life—
it was the root of it.
https://bio.site/Dinoalonso
I added the photos for emphasis.
Thank you, Dino.
For improving my day. For helping me re-center.
Bill's Focus 
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