To Sit, To Dwell

I can still see her sitting there.

Unless the day was quite cold, my grandmother did a fair share of her daily work sitting in the battered rocking chair on her front porch. Many’s the time I’ve seen her with a pan of peas or beans on her lap, her gnarled fingers selecting and snapping and dropping. Or with a garment that needed mending, her gray head bent over the fabric as she guided the needle through its proper places. Or with her Reader’s Digest Condensed Bible with its worn, pillowed green cover, open on her aproned lap, bookmarked with newspaper clippings (mostly obituaries) and leaves and pressed wildflowers.

But the memory of Nanny on her porch most deeply seared into the center of me is the memory of her just sitting. Sitting and looking down the road. Looking off into space. Watching the birds and the skies and the play of wind on grass.

The word “dwell” was a common and useful one in my family. My mother would use it to indicate holding a musical note. “Hear how he dwells on that note?” she would say while listening to a record. Nanny used it in that way, but also to indicate simply abiding, simply being.

“Whatcha doin’, Nanny?”

“Oh, just sittin’ here, dwellin’.”

Other than my family, my wife, and myself, I can’t recall seeing anyone just sitting and dwelling in years. Sometimes, I find myself doing it even when I don’t intend to. It is my regular habit to take a book and a notebook outside during friendly weather just to sit and read and write down reflections. But the older I grow, the more difficult it is for me to concentrate on a book while outdoors. The living world is simply too much of a draw for my senses. I will be a few pages into a chapter, and then a pair of doves will land nearby and start hunting for stray seeds. I will think again how much they look like a stodgy bank manager and his plump wife at a social function, and then I will begin thinking about money and finances and the bill we need to pay, and that leads me to a memory from childhood, and then a spider’s-web examination of just exactly why it is that I have this particular personality trait but not the one that my sister ended up with, and what was it that my mother used to call notebook paper, and poison ivy really does lie dormant beneath my skin until warm weather returns and I get the itch in that one patch on my leg, and did anyone ever have the kinds of friends I had when I was a young Marine, and this book is heavy and I should set it over here, and look, here comes Jinx with something in his mouth, and after I rub his ears, I settle back and stare across the meadow and become hyper-aware of the birds and their songs, and there really is a reason why these Adirondack chairs never fall out of favor with the sitting populace, and if there is a dwelling populace they must like them, too, and the sun feels so mellow against the back of my neck, and if I just sit very still, that bluebird might hop a little closer, and then two hours have flowed past me like creek water, and I come back to myself, and I feel…clean.

Some of the people I’ve spoken to about just sitting and dwelling look at me as if I have expressed an appreciation for lying on a bed of nails or alligator wrestling. Such a thing is simply not a part of their reality. They have to be dammit-to-hell doing something, because sloth is after all one of the deadly sins and there are only so many hours in a day.

A couple of years ago, Mrs. Orr and I went on a long drive in the surrounding county, just exploring and enjoying the day. We passed an old farmhouse, and a lean, elderly gent was sitting on his front porch in a rocker, his thin legs twined around each other like pipe cleaners, the way I could do when I was young and easy under the apple boughs, and he had his elbow on his knee and his chin in his palm and he was staring across the fields. He looked at us as we passed, and we waved, and he waved back, and then he returned to what he was doing. And what he was doing was simply sitting and dwelling. I know that if I could have explored his mind at that moment, it would have been a journey into the mysterious caverns of memory and regret and speculation and hope that honeycomb the region below our active, orderly, mission-driven lives.

Sometimes when I come back to myself after a stretch of sitting and dwelling, I muse to myself that if anyone nearby could have read or watched the panoramic display of what had been unspooling in my soul just a few minutes ago, they would have me locked up and possibly dissected for study. And that’s the really beautimus thing about sitting and dwelling. It belongs to the person doing it, and it  belongs entire. It is its own world, and for me, it seems to have more meaning than the one to which I return when the inevitable moment comes when I return to my present self.

For me, sitting and dwelling is the closest I come to pure prayer and true communion with God and His eternally, restlessly flexing mind. All John Masefield asked was a tall ship and a star to steer her by. All I ask is a sturdy chair and a private place to set it down. The stars themselves come to me there. And much more.

~ S.K. Orr