I need time to listen, to examine, and to confess ... to listen for the Voice, if for no other reason that so I will recognize it more clearly in the ways it speaks into the noise and bustle of the life I lead. The silence that I seek must be nurtured until it lives in me no matter where I am at the moment. The silence I seek must be something more than the absence of the numbing noise and debilitating detail of life in our society. It must be a solitude that is transcendent, a stillness that can be found in the midst of noise, a silence that is portable.
It is not enough to seek and care; to pay lip service to all manner of ideals. Real witness is what counts. It is something to do with leaps in the dark. Recognizing that Truth is hidden. But transformation towards truth is something else. It is practice and diligence.
Every night I had a sense to consciously pitch the tent of my being in a definite place of "unknowing." Bang in the pegs saying, I do not know anything. Inside the tent it might be dark, or maybe there were spins of moonlight. But in there, somehow or other, you know there is love. Love is, and may proceed from wherever you are, without you knowing anything very much.
As they talked together of The Way, the obstacles, the people, the signs ... you felt the great importance of the physicality of the quest. All of them stressed the power of silence: the need to be alone and find oneself in the silence. Moving alone, with silence as the single companion, seems a most profound means to register the natural balance of the world without, and world within.
A pair of long, black woolen stockings hung there, and in one of them a huge darn. A perfected circle of calmly woven thread, no bobble or tug, no tension, no rough knot. Only someone very special, stable, and peaceful could make that kind of darn. To me it was a work of art. To do the smallest thing so supremely well, it had to be done with Love.
