Wisdom and compassion must walk together. Having wisdom without compassion is like walking with one foot. You will fall down. If you have both wisdom and compassion, you can walk very well, step by step.
~ Step by Step: Meditations on Wisdom and Compassion by Maga Ghosananda
On this bright still silent November day, we walk through bare thickets toward the lake like a silver mirror; so calm, so glassy, it holds on its wide surface all the patterns of light and air above. Its silence silences us. Its stillness stops us in our tracks. As I bend to touch a stone, I hear a voice say, "Love the earth". I cock my ear and hear the echo, faint yet unmistakable as ocean sounding in a shell. When I try to summon it once more, only my words come. A great and terrible tenderness breaks over me. Each pebble, each shell, is filled with beauty; each, in this moment, articulate, a word spoken, and I imagine beyond the grasp of hearing the great murmuring of creation beneath my feet. I feel these patient stones lie like an eternal sacrifice, offering me the ground of their existence on which to grind and crunch the pathways of my life ... I haven't begun to love the earth. Does it take the awareness of our death to wake us up to life?
You can visualize God's light each day and send it to someone who needs help. Your divine nature can reach out and touch the divine nature of another. Within you is the light of the world, it is to be shared with the world. One way of prayer is to visualize a golden light within you and spread it out, first to those about you and then gradually to the world. Keep on visualizing God's golden light surrounding the earth. If you have a problem, take the matter to God in Silence, visualize it in God's hand. Then leave it, knowing it is in the best possible hands, and turn your attention to other things. Carry with you a constant prayer of gratitude. This will add your love and peace to the world.
Give me work to do;
Give me health;
Give me joy in simple things.
Give me an eye for beauty,
A tongue for truth,
A heart that love,
A mind that reasons,
A sympathy that understands;
Give me neither malice nor envy,
But a true kindness
And a noble common sense.
At the close of each day
Give me a book,
And a friend with whom
I can be silent.
BLESSINGS of peace, joy and gratitude be with you! How do we return to the Giver of Life the abundance of blessing we receive? Only in the Silence, where the Beloved abides, will the deep response be given. And so, we give thanks as we befriend the Silence, that out of the Silence the words we speak will reveal the Word.
One night last autumn I was strangely drawn to the beauty of a moonlit night; there was a strong urge to become part of the night and its beauty. After finishing my kitchen work, I went outside for a walk in the woods with my little puppy. The powerful beauty of the night stirred in my soul. The large silvery moon cast an eerie glow on my world, darkly engraving towering spruce trees against the lighter spaces between earth and its heavens. As the puppy trotted obediently and silently beside me, our shadowy figures against the ground were as daguerreotypes of days past. Almost without provocation, except by the incredibly soft beauty of the night, I felt the desire to meditate. I sat down on a grassy spot and my puppy sat by my side.
~ from A MEDITATOR'S DIARY by Jane Hamilton-Merritt
Geese appear high over us,
pass, and the sky closes. Abandon,
as in love or sleep, holds
them to their way, clear
in the ancient faith: what we need
is here. And we pray, not
for new earth or heaven, but to be
quiet in heart, and in eye,
clear. What we need is here.
An insight made available to us by the hermit's life is that we are all, each one of us, a hermit; that in the end we know we are a unique creation of God, and alone because of that uniqueness, and that this alone-ness become solitude is the meeting place with God. This is true no matter how social and communal our exterior lives may be. It is within our interior solitude, the solitude and silence that many of us (including hermits) try to shut out with noise and activity of various sorts in order to evade that encounter, that we are called into truth and confrontation with mercy, that we are given what it is we have to give in our encounters with other people who in their own lives are engaged in the same searching.
~ from THE FIRE OF YOUR LIFE: A SOLITUDE SHARED by Maggie Ross
Green water in the creek is clear
Moonlight on Cold Mountain is white
Silently knowing, the spirit is enlightened of itself
Contemplate emptiness, and the world grows more still.
A disciple suddenly discovered the richness of fecundity of emptiness -- the realization that everything is impermanent, unsatisfactory, and empty of self. In this mood of divine emptiness, he sat in joy under a tree, when suddenly flowers began to fall all around him.
And the angels whispered, "But I haven't uttered a word about emptiness."
"True," the angels replied. "You have not spoken of emptiness, we have not heard of emptiness. This is true emptiness." And the showers of blossoms continued to fall.
To be empty is to practice letting go of the fears that possess us and to be more attached to the substance of life, the love in the silence. To be empty is to be available for the riches of the hidden harmony instead of the substitutions our fears would have us settle for. With emptiness as a friend we are brought to a new fullness of quiet, a fullness that comes from our commitment to a life in the silence. We make more room for emptiness as we value the wonder, the grand heights, and quiet recesses of silence. We find more emptiness as we commit ourselves to the mysteries worth beholding, to the inner life that has more space and appreciation to expand in our emptiness.
Life is to live and life is to give and talents are
to use for good if you choose.
Do not pray for easy lives.
Pray to be stronger.
Do not pray for tasks equal to your powers.
Pray for powers equal to your tasks --
then the doing of your work shall be no
miracle but you shall be a miracle.
Every day you shall wonder at yourself ...
at the richness of life which has come
to you by the grace of God. But everyone
needs someone -- knowing that
somewhere someone is thinking of you.
The Heart of Understanding gives us solid ground for making peace with ourselves, for transcending the fear of birth and death, the duality of this and that. In the light of emptiness, everything is everything else, we inter-are, everyone is responsible for everything that happens in life. When you produce peace and happiness in yourself, you begin to realize peace for the whole world. With the smile that you produce in yourself, with the conscious breathing you establish within yourself, you begin to work for peace in the world. To smile is not to smile only for yourself; the world will change because of your smile. When you sit in the silence, if you enjoy even one moment of sitting, if you establish serenity and happiness inside yourself, you provide the world with a solid base of peace. If you do not give yourself peace, how can you share it with others? If you do not begin your peace work with yourself, where will you go to begin it?
~ from THE HEART OF UNDERSTANDING by Thich Nhat Hanh
I find that a life of little whispered words of adoration, of praise, of prayer, of worship can be breathed all through the day. One can have a very busy day, outwardly speaking, and yet be steadily in the holy Presence ... It is a life unspeakable and full of glory, an inner world of splendor within which we may live.
The stilling of the intellect in the presence of the Divine leads to "the abstract God", "the God of awareness", or "the God of unknowing", which are all words to express the inexpressible. This silence of the mind is the supreme adoration before God; and the finding of Divine Love in the constant personal awareness of the world created around us and within us is the anonymous prayer which in the secret liturgy of the universe unites us to the source of all being with every breath we take and every word we utter in our daily surrender to life.
Real knowledge comes from the unitive experience of God; the world's great saints and mystics have been given the key to that knowledge, and it is in turn their burden as well as their privilege to impart it to others. Once we 'set our minds on God's realm and God's justice before everything else, all the rest will come to us as well.' (Matthew 6:33) We begin to grasp the truth, that contemplative prayer -- that deep, inner loving look at God in silence -- is the way of the path, not acquisitive knowledge. And as we proceed, such amazing understanding of the fabric of the universe will be declared to us that we will scarcely be able to contain ourselves for joy that the creation is as it is. Once we are ready, God does not withhold anything from our grasp. And the measure of our readiness to receive real knowledge is our capacity to flow out in love to our neighbor.
The pure sound
of the bell
summons us into
the present moment.
The timeless ring of
truth is expressed in
many different voices,
each one magnifying
and illuminating
the sacred.
The clarity of its song
resonates within us
and calls us away
from those things
which often distract us --
that which was,
that which might be --
to that which is.
Prayer doesn't place us in the presence of God; rather it is a time when we are especially attentive to the presence of God which is there all the time ... The voice of God is a still, small voice on the breath of a gentle breeze, but because so much of our life is spent in the noisy haste of activity, we fail to recognize the most profoundly beautiful experience in all of creation -- the presence of God that permeates everything. We need to be still, silent and listen ...
In the waiting hour of twilight, my grandfather taught me about silence. We fished in a small rowboat on the lake until after the moon rose glistening in the water. He explained the rules of fishing, "Bait your own hook, sit still, and don't talk or you will disturb the fish." Each trip was the same. We left behind the cottage and, as we detached ourselves farther and farther from shore a new peace came to us. One time his voice entered the silence saying, "If you listen really hard, God will tell you stories." I listened, and he was right. My mind envisioned new and exciting "somedays" and I came close to tears in the face of the starry night's beauty.
