Still Water

You will not find a lotus in a mountain stream. Not in a river's main channel, not in a tidal creek, not anywhere the water moves with real purpose. The lotus grows in ponds, in lakes, in flooded fields, in the slow backwaters where a river forgets itself and settles. Give it a current and it does not do well.

Every one of the lotus's gifts depends on this. The bead of rain that rolls off the leaf needs a leaf that is not being thrashed. The stalk that lifts the flower into the air needs water that will not knock it flat. The warmth in the center of the bloom, the breath piped down the hollow stem, the seed sinking to the mud and waiting: all of it asks for one thing first. That the water hold still.

Now think about your own week

Set the pond aside and look at your calendar for the next seven days.

Is there a single still hour in it? Not an hour of rest, exactly. An hour where the water holds. No scrolling, no errands, no catching up, no being available. If you are like most people I know, the answer is no, and the reason is that you have been telling yourself a story about when stillness is allowed. Later. When the project ships. When the kids are older. When the account has enough in it. When things calm down.

We have stillness backwards. We treat it as a reward, the thing we get once the work is done. Quiet is for later. Now is for the current.

The lotus has it the other way around. Stillness is not what it earns by growing. Stillness is what it grows in. Take the stillness away and there is no growth left to reward. The pond comes first.

The lotus does not earn still water. It requires it.

Which means the quiet hour you keep pushing off until things calm down is not a luxury you cannot afford yet. It is the pond. It is the condition. Whatever you are hoping will grow in you, the steadiness, the clear head, the work that is actually yours, cannot do it in a current, no matter how fast and impressively the current is moving.

Still is not clean

A caution, before this gets too pretty. Still water is not clear water. The pond the lotus loves is rich, muddy, full of what has fallen into it. Stillness is not the absence of trouble. It is what lets the trouble settle, so the mud goes to the bottom and the water above it clears enough for light to get through.

You will know this if you have ever sat quietly for ten minutes after a hard day. The first few minutes are worse. Everything you have been outrunning catches up. Then, if you stay, it begins to settle, and you can see what is actually there. That is the other thing a still pond offers, and it is why the lotus's reflection is so exact: only water that has stopped moving can show you what is standing in it. A lotus and its reflection in silver is a small, quiet way to carry that reminder. Stop moving, and you can see what you are.

Choose the pond

So the practice is the plainest one in this whole series. Choose the pond. Pick one hour this week where the water will hold still, and put it on the calendar before anything else gets there. The lotus cannot choose; it simply dies in a current, so it has to be planted where there is none. You are not so helpless. You can choose the still water. Choose it first, before the growing, not after.

I began this series with the thought that the lotus does not begin at the surface. It ends here, with the surface itself, held still so that everything underneath can rise. If you want to go round again, start with the flower that closes at dusk. This is one of a series of short essays on the lotus. The rest are gathered here.

Somewhere this evening a river is running hard past a bend, and in the quiet curve behind it a pond has gone perfectly still, and something is growing.