We have to earn silence, then, to work for it: to make it not an absence but a presence; not emptiness but repletion. Silence is something more than just a pause; it is that enchanted place where space is cleared and time is stayed and the horizon itself expands. In silence, we often say we can hear ourselves think; but what is truer to say is that in silence we can hear ourselves not think, and so sink below our selves into a place far deeper than mere thoughts allow. In silence, we might better say, we can hear Someone else think ... Silence, then, could be said to be the ultimate province of trust: it is the place where we trust ourselves to be alone; where we trust others to understand the things we do not say; where we trust a higher harmony to assert itself.
~ from "The Eloquent Sounds of Silence" by Pico Iyer with thanks to John Farren
The soul of each one of us has its destination, and that is the Divine Heart. What is true of each of us is true of all the world. Walt Whitman in his strong, urgent way cries: "One thought ever at the fore, that in the Divine Ship, the world breasting time and space, all peoples of the globe together sail, sail the same voyage, are bound to the same destination." Some such thought as this is surely necessary for the bare subsistence of a soul, for our souls cannot live without the sense of destination.
