In the depths of silence, we are all one, and it is through interior stillness that knowledge of our oneness with the Creator reaches us. It has been truly said that the voice of silence carries infinitely farther than the loudest cry. Such a union as this can never be ours except in silence, and through stillness and deep prayer and meditation we can begin to comprehend the meaning of Infinity and of that one Mind in which we all live and move and have our being.
~ from the Wellesley Tudor Pole, thanks to Edith Spenser
"Make of yourself a light,"
said the Buddha,
before he died.
I think of this every morning
as the east begins
to tear off its many clouds
of darkness....
The light burns upward,
it thickens and settles over the fields...
Even before the sun itself
hangs, disattached, in the blue air,
I am touched everywhere
by its ocean of yellow waves...
And then I feel the sun itself
as it blazes over the hills,
like a million flowers on fire—
clearly I'm not needed,
yet I feel myself turning
into something of inexplicable value...
~ Mary Oliver, excerpts from "The Buddha's Last Instruction" in HOUSE OF LIGHT
...Still, what I want in my life
is to be willing
to be dazzled—
to cast aside the weight of facts
and maybe even
to float a little
above this difficult world.
I want to believe I am looking
into the white fire of a great mystery.
I want to believe that the imperfections are nothing—
that the light is everything—that it is more than the sum
of each flawed blossom rising and fading. And I do.
