Something is happening to me. I’m becoming more still. I’m undergoing the phases. Outwardly, just like everyone else here, I move. Of course, I move. The stillness is within. It grows inside me here, the same way it has for everyone else. It’s active and in motion. All that activity and motion, though, arises from it and subsides back into it. There’s no tension at all. There’s no sense of lying in wait, no ambush. No waiting, really. It would be more accurate to say, everything becomes a form of waiting. No one here is trying to keep still. It’s not something that can be accomplished. I can see there’s something off about the idea that I would fixate on being still and then become still, because that would mean moving into a state of motionlessness, which makes no sense. The idea is the reverse. I have to stop moving, which means going with the flow, the silent flows, the flows of silence. Then I will be safe, right in the heart of the vaster current of time, carried along, motionless. No more learning. No need for concern. Asking for nothing to happen is like slamming on the brakes on a busy highway. If I really want nothing to happen, I have to siphon into one of the many eddies in the ribbon of events. Then I could glide frictionlessly from each instant to the next, let them mesh and blur into one perennial, muted outpouring of fraught color and jangled, senseless noise. Even all the trouble I had to take fixing up my house, wrangling with the bank, which was situated in the same town, was less and less disturbing. It was as if patching up the house were bringing it into closer accord with its surroundings. I had to see my house from the perspective of the town as a whole in order to integrate it, which made me a sort of unwitting agent for the town. This required a realignment of my thoughts, too. It would be more accurate to say that I had to change my way of thinking. My house was part of the bank of a river of quiet. My repairs were made slowly and with as little noise as possible. After I’d finished, the house looked no different, inside or out. It was important that it be unchanged on the inside, because this isn’t a question of superficial appearances. “stillville” isn’t quiet because people keep their dirty secrets well hidden, but because there are no secrets here. There are no hiding places or reasons to use them, unless the whole town could be considered a hiding place.