You are in this time of the interim
where everything seems withheld.
The path you took to get here has washed out.
The way forward is still concealed from you.
The old is not old enough to have died away.
The new is still too young to be born.
~ John O'Donohue from "For the Interim Time" in TO BLESS THE SPACE BETWEEN US
One morning, as a fire flamed back of a handsome eighteenth-century glass screen, I looked for the silence underneath the explosions of the fire... By now I was adept at finding the silence wherever it was. As I settled into it this morning, letting it fill my ears, mind and being, I heard the words: "I'll never abandon you, no matter what you do." ... Once I heard it, I learned to go and find, first the silence and then to wait for the voice. It comes OUT of the silence. It doesn't always come. But somehow I know it will again. And this knowledge has changed my existence. What I have to do, I now understand, is keep myself ready to hear it when it does.
