Children do not yet "know" enough to resist the force that governs and guides them from one goodness to the next. They haven't yet been fooled by their senses into practicing the impractical practice of trying to run their own lives and prove themselves in relation to others. So they show us what the scriptures teach -- that there is something we can trust. Our superficial perspective fools us all into seeking security by hanging on to certain interpersonal conditions and experiences in what is, after all, an exploding universe of divine self-revelation. This places us in opposition to the current of life and prevents us from increasingly seeing and expressing the unfolding good of God. Yet in the silence, we too can learn to go with and be carried along by the flow -- from one liberating revelation of the great eternal One to the next.
~ from COMING TO LIFE: TRAVELING THE SPIRITUAL PATH IN EVERYDAY LIFE by Polly Berends with thanks to Gay Grissom
I am here alone for the first time in weeks, to take up my 'real' life again at last. That is what is strange — that friends, even passionate love, are not my real life unless there is time alone in which to explore and to discover what is happening or has happened. Without the interruptions, nourishing and maddening, this life would become arid. Yet I taste it fully only when I am alone here ...
The phoebe sits on her nest Hour after hour, Day after day, Waiting for life to burst out From under her warmth. Can I weave a nest of silence, weave it of listening, listening, listening, Layer upon layer? But one must first become small, Nothing but a presence, Attentive as a nesting bird, Proffering no slightest wish Toward anything that might happen or be given, Only the warm, faithful waiting, contained in one’s smallness. Beyond the question, the silence. Before the answer, the silence.
How rare in our world to sit absolutely still for an hour, not thinking, not even feeling, simply being in the presence of great beauty! At first one notices the small things, the subtle changes as wind suddenly ruffles a small space in the water, the amber color of still water over sand, or the reflection of a single tree; but little by little, it is the whole unified scene that takes over. And it is the silence itself that unifies it. One slides down deep deep into contemplation. This is not ecstasy like the light on lavender petals. It is more like prayer. Beauty beyond our understanding and beyond our uniqueness as individuals. Presence that asks nothing of us except to be in its presence. And filled with that presence, we walk back into our separate lives.
