ROBERT’S JOYFUL STILLNESS
by Cornelia Powell (written for and read at "A Celebration of Robert" memorial event Sept 7th on Zoom)
I learned the spiritual intelligence of curiosity from Robert and I learned to never doubt the creative depth of childlike wondering.
Through Robert I found the courage to let go and feel what it was like to be truly seen without my “identity mask” or any egoic notion that I was separate from the world. Robert saw the shining star in all of us.
We learned the freedom of “deep play” from Robert—a willingness to surrender and be transformed into something lighter, more true, more heart-felt.
Robert opened the door into stillness…then opened it wider and wider for us with a communal spirit of inclusiveness, and we found ourselves in its depth, gliding through a liminal space, crossing a new threshold.
~ ~ ~
A few years before I met Robert and Cynthia, I studied with the people who practically “invented” stillness, some say over 10,000 years ago…the Daoists of ancient China. (Or at least they invented the path to stillness through their deep, deep meditative breathing techniques, often sitting for days in remote caves.)
My first teacher was a young, playful Daoist priest, Master Chen, who had been sent to the United States by his revered teacher to bring the peaceful wisdom of Daoism to the West. (This was a big, big deal in the shifting spiritual landscape of the world; perhaps the equivalent of Moses parting the Red Sea. But that’s another story!)
Chen’s teacher who’d had this far-reaching vision was the Grand Master of all Daoists. She (yes, a woman, but that’s another story too!) was a regal 129 years old when I met her in Wu Dang, China. I remember she affectionately called Chen, her wise and energetic former student, “my little monkey.” This was the same young man she had sent to a strange foreign land to change the modern world!
Throughout history, many pioneering, visionary mystics have used light-hearted playfulness, even spirited mischief, to do some serious business—like the profound work of shifting global consciousness!
So when I met Robert soon after studying in China, with his electrical buffing machines and stillness-spinning discs with their promise of meditative paradise, it was truly the slow-paced ancient world meeting speedy modern technology! (And I loved the paradoxical tease that “stillness” was offered with such lively enthusiasm…from both Master Chen and our Robert!)
Robert’s massaging buffers broke through centuries of inherited noisy mental nonsense that our hardened bodies carried. But it was Robert’s voice—his tactilely shapeshifting, melodic voice—and his inventive, kinesthetic understanding of the frequencies of the universe and how to capture them with our opened bodies, combined with rhythmic sounds on those little plastic discs that could take even a practiced Daoist into deeper depths of stillness.
That reverberating stillness found us, then opened sacred portals for us to discover something precious that we couldn’t have found on our own. (Robert seemed delighted he’d found playmates to take with him on this joyful adventure!)
After Robert retired, the remarkable journey continued for each of us in our own way, in our own sense of wondering and discovery.
~ ~ ~
When Robert wrote the words, “love is a place” (he even won a poetry award for the words!) he was asking us to break free of old cultural concepts of what we thought love meant and tap into that “something else” the universe offers—something real and uniting and holy (along with a holy giggle or two thrown in!) The place he was pointing to, a place touched by the Divine, was inside a new future called forth by love.
In his poetry and in his life, Robert invited us to answer the call of love.
And love he did. ~
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