Confronting our own silences, and listening to ourselves, eventually moves us toward listening to other, previously unheard silences. To the silences in many who have had to quiet the expressive parts of themselves. To the silences of children, too often "shushed" as having nothing to contribute. To the silences of Earth, in its land and air and water, so often in pain where we have abused it, as well as to the faulty systems, structures, and customs that reinforce such troubling silence. As our listening deepens, we inevitably touch the Center of all stillness. In the midst of all the silences, we become able to hear the quiet Presence of the One who loves us, cherishes us, needs us... We meet the Holy Mystery whose listening to us is the primordial power, hearing us into speech.
What if we reframed "living with uncertainty" to "navigating mystery"? There's more energy in that phrase. The hum of imaginative voltage. And is our life not a mystery school, a seat of earthy instruction?
~ Martin Shaw from the essay "Navigating the Mysteries" on EMERGENCE MAGAZINE
At a conference on the Iranian poet Hafez I attended recently, one of the older Persian speakers suddenly leaned forward to the audience and said, "Make your work The Face of the Beloved, and let what you create be her lashes, her mole, her lips." To do that would mean carrying all these gifts, letting the radiance of the World beyond the world shine into each cottage door you come to. Doing so requires both huge strength and the capacity for a kind of visible luminosity, an active principle that can only be born from a great stillness.
What I've seen on my rounds is that if you are lucky enough to have the opportunity to reflect at the end of a life, then love is revealed as the great currency. It's the thing. The treasury. It's what mattered...
How well did I love? whom did I love?, and how was love central to the life that I made for myself?
...When the lots are counted, when we are gathered in, we will find that it was love that mattered. Love expressed, given, received, fought for. So for those of us fighting right now, I say; keep going. As a culture, as an individual, believe in the full life that is your bequeathed inheritance, not the subterranean half-life that terror and impoverished minded bullies will try and spike your wine with. You are too good for that.
~ Martin Shaw in A COUNSEL OF RESISTANCE AND DELIGHT IN THE FACE OF FEAR
