Each person is born with an unencumbered spot, free of expectation and regret, free of ambition and embarrassment, free of fear and worry, an umbilical spot of grace where we were first touched by God. It is this spot of grace that issues Peace. To know this spot of inwardness is to know who we are, not by surface markers of identity, not by where we work or how we like to be addressed, but by feeling our place in relation to the Infinite and by inhabiting it. We each live in the midst of ongoing tension, growing tarnished or covered over only to be worn back to that incorruptible spot of grace at our core.
~ by Mark Nepo in KITCHEN TABLE WISDOM by R. N. Remen
Calm and serene, let us listen to the Inner Voice. How could I have lived all that time without realizing that everything in the world has a voice and speaks? Not just the things that are supposed to speak, but the others, like the gate, the walls of the houses, the shade of trees, the sand, and the silence. Even before my accident [where I went blind], I loved sound, but now it seems clear that I didn't listen to it.
It was as though the sounds of earlier days were too far away from me, and heard through a fog. At all events my accident had thrown my head against the humming heart of things, and the heart never stopped beating.
The world of violins and flutes, of horns and cellos, of fugues, scherzos and gavottes, obeyed laws which were so clear that all music seemed to speak of God. My body was not listening, it was praying. My spirit no longer had bounds, and if tears came to my eyes, I did not feel them running down because they were outside me. I wept with gratitude every time the orchestra began to sing. A world of sounds for a blind man, what sudden grace! The inner world made concrete.
