Keeping Quiet - A poem for this time of year

This is my Christmas message for 2008. I've gotten so much beautiful response that I decided to post it here for anyone and everyone to find. I'm even finding others have picked up this Neruda poem for their own season message in emails and on websites. May his words keep moving and moving - around the world and in our hearts.

December 20, 2008

Dear friends around the world,

I'm snowed in, and savoring the quiet and beauty. With all the madness of shopping and emails and busy-ness, I offer as my holiday greeting an invitation to pause as Pablo Neruda suggests in the poem below.

I'll be busy myself soon enough. With the reissue of Your Money or Your Life (see the site), I'll be on tour in January and am already getting audiences and reporters asking me what to do about the unfolding economic crisis. While the questions are looking for simple, quick fixes this is a problem decades in the making and I can think of no better tonic right now than, as Neruda says, to keep quiet. Settle down. Settle in.

As with any trauma, we need to stop, feel the impact, tell the story to friends, know we are alive and safe, trace how we got there and if there was some lie or blindness involved -- and choose again, choose anew.

Liam Moriarty posed these "what can we do questions" to me last week in a local NPR interview. Click to listen. It's short and I think it carries the spirit I carry now.

With deep wishes to each of you for a wonderful season of quiet and a richly loving New Year,

Vicki

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Vicki Robin
www.vickirobin.com
Co-author, Your Money or Your Life
www.yourmoneyoryourlife.info
Box 1501,
Langley, WA 98260
Business Phone: 206.931.8162
Home (personal calls only): 360.221.2251

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Keeping Quiet - A Callarse

Pablo Neruda
(Translation from Peaceful Rivers)

Now we will count to twelve

and we will all keep still.

This one time upon the earth,

let's not speak any language,

let's stop for one second,

and not move our arms so much.

It would be a delicious moment,

without hurry, without locomotives,

all of us would be together

in a sudden uneasiness.

The fishermen in the cold sea

would do no harm to the whales

and the peasant gathering salt

would look at his torn hands.

Those who prepare green wars,

wars of gas, wars of fire,

victories without survivors,

would put on clean clothing

and would walk alongside their brothers

in the shade, without doing a thing.

What I want shouldn't be confused

with final inactivity:

life alone is what matters,

I want nothing to do with death.

If we weren't unanimous

about keeping our lives so much in motion,

if we could do nothing for once,

perhaps a great silence would

interrupt this sadness,

this never understanding ourselves

and threatening ourselves with death,

perhaps the earth is teaching us

when everything seems to be dead

and then everything is alive.

Now I will count to twelve

and you keep quiet and I'll go.