In the soft morning light, Rockefeller Memorial Chapel looks more intimate than imposing. I’m outside—Friday morning, 8 a.m. sharp—for the mediation series Twenty Minutes Still. During the academic year, community members gather in Rockefeller every weekday morning for guided meditation. I’ve been before, in my first quarter at the College, but I’m looking forward to a different experience this time: during the summer meditation is not guided, but open.

Rockefeller’s wooden doors are as inviting as always, and I enter—to a storm of prospective students waiting for an information session. I catch a glimpse of two men with yoga cushions, and set off after them. They disappear from sight, and I canvas the chapel, the lawns, the alcoves, the Muslim prayer room, and even the “Uncommon Rooms” in the basement, but they’re nowhere to be found.

Come Monday morning, I try again. This time, there’s no info session inside, or anybody else. I grab a cushion from under the pews closest to the front, and resolve to do my best impersonation of solo meditation.

View from cushion on apse. (Photography by Derek Tsang, AB’15)

It’s strange to look out at Rockefeller from the apse, only to see the strikingly symmetrical files of pews uninhabited. I’ve only ever been for occasions: the teary-eyed goodbye to parents after Commencement, the Aims of Education’s somnolent introduction to college lectures, and an alto saxophonist whose name I never caught accompanied only by his own echo during the Hyde Park Jazz Festival.

I remember sitting—I can see exactly where—and keeping silences, by turns polite or reverential, my mind churning. Now, without noise—a speech, a pastor, or the anchor of a meditation instructor’s voice—I’m trapped by self-consciousness. My body’s still, but not my mind. A middle-aged woman in heels clanks in and finds a pew in the back. I watch her watch me for a few minutes before leaving.

Tuesday morning, I come back. I finally notice a printed schedule of Rockefeller’s upcoming events for the week—no Twenty Minutes Still, or anything like it. A sign announces “Restorative Yoga in Bond Chapel today.” I make the trek, but that’s a dead end too; Bond Chapel is just as empty. I walk slowly back to Rockefeller, to the plush, serendipitous cushions in the front. I grab one, and head upstairs for a nap: my worship of choice.