Coffee at one

There was a moment at my favorite coffee shop where essentially everyone had stopped talking. Perhaps this would not seem so unusual if every table had not been full; this was a room of twenty-some assorted people sitting in public, many there for the express purpose of conversing with those across from or around them, and in a moment these things stopped. It would be difficult for me to effectively describe the near sacred sense of stillness that fell over the room from my perspective in the corner. It was so easy, on the other hand, to silently drop in for a moment and recognize all of us resting in space, absent of any responsibility or expectation. I can imagine that most people in the room were not consciously settling in that same way, and I don’t mean to imagine that they were or disparage the fact that they may not have been, but the room still suddenly became a most conducive environment for recognition of a very still, very spacious feeling in the present. There wasn’t even a conscious thought or feeling of “here’s a bunch of people sitting here together in silence” so much as just the slight audible openness, that I could liken to the feeling of being in a cave without any sound to bounce and echo, but just the audible sense that there is a great, singular space; one bright pearl.