 My favorite place of stillness is a lake up in northern Wisconsin in the Nicolay National Forest called Shoe Lake. There are only two human dwellings on Shoe Lake. There's not an easy boat access. In fact, the only boat I've ever seen on the lake is my own kayak. I try to get there at least one time each winter. Trudging along in the snow toward the lake, I can hear each footstep in the snow. I veer off an old logging road into deeper snow down to the side of the lake, and there I stop and I stand as still as I can. The sound of my footsteps has ceased. There's no wind. The trees stand as still as giant statues. There are no waves because the lake's frozen. No cars or snowmobiles can be heard. Sometimes the snow is falling gently and noiselessly. All is quiet. Absolutely quiet. Completely quiet. All is still. It is stunning and arresting. I hold my breath so even that sound is gone. It's a sacred moment. It's an expansive moment that fills my soul. That one moment can get me through a long Wisconsin winter. I experienced a very different kind of stillness when I visited the village of Benay-Benay in the Philippines. The congregation I used to serve in Appleton has a partner church in Benay-Benay. Unlike Shoe Lake, there is plenty of noise in Benay-Benay, beginning with the roosters calling at about 4.30 in the morning. There is, for me at least, a notable form of quietness, and that is there's no phone signal. No Wi-Fi. No computers. It's a place where I was completely disconnected. When I was there that time, after deciding that the roosters were likely not to stop, I decided to go outside the church where I was sleeping. There were several men chatting in the church yard as the sun rose. One of the church's two ministers, Giovanni, invited me over to his house, which was next door. His house is a thatched hut with a corrugated metal roof. Giovanni's wife, Joanabeth, sells Avon, and so there's an authorized Avon dealership sign on the side of the house. The house is up on stilts. Underneath the main living area is an area where they cook and eat. I climbed up the ladder into the living space and spent a wonderful time talking with the family. Then I joined several people in an early morning walk around the village, and even though it was only six in the morning, it was super hot already. I was quickly drenched in sweat. We walked along a dirt road with sugar cane towering on each side. One of the church members had a knife, and so she cut off a piece of the sugar cane and whittled the ends, gave it to me to chew. What moist, delicious sweetness that was. We stopped at the water source, which is the lifeblood for this village. And already there were women gathered there to get water and to begin laundry. Then we went on to the congregational president's house. There we had a pre-breakfast snack, as they called it, which was pasta and chicken and fruit. We capped that off with some coconut water, fresh off a coconut tree in the backyard. So lots contributed to the magic of that morning in Benai Benai. Maybe most important of all, I was able to be completely present, savoring each moment with joy, delight, and my full attention. I really had no sense of time. It felt like that might have been five minutes or five hours. Though an entirely different setting from the wintry shores of Shoe Lake, I had a similar feeling within, a feeling of serenity, equanimity, centeredness, well-being. It was, in its own way, a moment of stillness in Benai Benai. Only the stillness was completely inside this time. As Buddhists who meditate or Christians who practice contemplative prayer well know, you really don't have to travel to the Philippines or even the north woods of Wisconsin to find stillness. It can be as close as a meditation cushion or a comfortable chair in your house. It's tic-nac handwriting, or it can be right there when you're doing the dishes in your kitchen. So what are some characteristics of these moments of stillness, be they quiet or noisy, distant or right where we live? Well, these are moments when we are truly in the moment, completely absorbed in the present. In Buddhist lingo, these are moments when we are completely mindful of what we're doing at the moment. We're not thinking about the past. We're not thinking about the future. Our monkey minds, as Buddhists talk about, and our devices and our diversions are switched off. They're not distracting us from this very moment. These moments of stillness are embodied moments. Even for a Buddhist monk deep in meditation, there is an attentiveness, a connectedness to their body, to their sitting or walking, whatever they're doing while meditating, to their breathing. Moments of stillness envelop the body and all of our senses. Moments of stillness open our imaginations and potentially unleash our creativity. We can imagine what it might be like to live a centered, open, peaceful life, truly connected to our soul, to others, and to place. We can imagine new possibilities for our life and our world. Our creative juices can start flowing. And these moments of stillness are what I would call soulful moments. Kathleen Norris writes about a little girl in North Dakota who wrote about silence. Silence reminds me to take my soul with me wherever I go. While stillness, whether quiet or loud, does the same thing. It's a recognition in those moments that, hey, our soul is with us always. In some ways, I feel like this pandemic is the perfect time to encounter more opportunities for stillness with the absence of spending time with friends or going to restaurants or movies or sporting events or traveling. Many of us find ourselves with more time and space in our lives. Some of us don't and I want to lift up that reality. For example, parents who are trying to work at home while also helping coach their kids through every hour of virtual school, five days a week. They're not finding more time and space in their lives. I found though, even though I'm lucky enough to have more time and space, I'm generally not making the most of that opportunity. Maybe that's true for some of you as well. Distractions, diversions, monkey mind have mostly sucked my attention. Anxiety about the pandemic, the election, the racism so painfully and obviously still present in 2020, these have all been overwhelming at times. There is a cacophony of noise, a cornucopia of distraction in my life right now, even if I'm not going to parties or restaurants or stepping on a plane. Mindfulness actually feels harder to me now than usual. And so this difficult distracting moment in our lives calls us to try to create and find more opportunities for stillness. I invite you to join me in the season of Advent and solstice to create some opportunities for stillness. Advent, this month before Christmas, is a season of waiting. In the mythical story of Jesus' birth, Mary has to wait a long time, nine months after Gabriel shares this news that she unexpectedly is going to have a child. And as with any pregnancy, that waiting gets more intense in the last month. For Mary, it's a complicated time and place to prepare to give birth. There's the Roman occupation, there's this last minute census that causes her and her beloved to have to travel to a distant village. Giving birth to a baby in a stable was not part of her plan, I'm guessing. The Advent season and the Christmas story, like Hanukkah, draw on the more ancient rituals and stories and spiritualities of the winter solstice. In northern lands, this is a season of short days, long nights, cold, and mystery. It's a season of fallowness. We wait for the sun to begin to return, for the cold to end, for spring to come, for the grasses and the flowers and the trees to burst forth again, for the sandhill cranes to return. The rituals of this season invite us to sink into, to embrace the cold, the darkness, the fallowness, and even the waiting. There is a beauty in all this. The solstice invites us to revel in this quiet, dark beauty. So this is a season to sit in a chair with a blanket and a steaming cup of tea, even for five minutes if we can find the time, to contemplate our own life and life capital L. It is a season to prepare room in our hearts for what is to come, ironically by living fully in this moment, not living in the what is to come. So I invite you to create opportunities this month for stillness. Find ways to cut down on the distractions even for a few moments. If you're one of those people whose life is busier in the pandemic, maybe even try to find a five-minute block here and there. Create opportunities to pay attention to the soul. Friends, we are in a complicated time. Now, we're not like Mary where we have to worry about Roman occupiers who are pretty brutal or am I going to give birth to this baby with a roof over my head. But it is a complicated time nonetheless. And it can be tempting just to lose ourself in the waiting, waiting for a vaccine, waiting for this COVID-19 nightmare to end, waiting to embrace our beloveds, waiting to come back in person to a service at FUS, waiting for January 20, waiting for racism to end, or at least for black and brown bodies to stop getting killed. Advent and solstice invite us to actually sit with this waiting, to sit where we are in 2020, not to jump in our minds ahead to 2021. Like Owling, you just need a couple things, bravery and hope, at least a little bit. And who knows? You might find some calm, some peace, some insight or wisdom in these moments. There's no guarantee just like Owling, you can create opportunities to see an owl, but you might not. Sometimes the owl answers, sometimes it doesn't. The only guarantee is that if we stay stuck in this world of distractions, these moments of calm and peace and insight and wisdom are not likely to come unless we're really lucky. I've only seen an owl fly over me in a car twice in my life. I'd be more likely to see an owl if like the father and the child I ventured into the woods on a full moon night. I'm more likely to experience insights if I create stillness in my life. Find a stillness, hold a stillness, let the stillness care. Let me flower, help me flower, watch me flower, care. In the spirit, by the spirit, with the spirit giving power, I will find true.