Have you ever, as a small child, wandered farther from home than you meant to or were aware of until you found yourself in a place where you had never been before? All at once you realize that YOU are in this strange place. Stock still, not breathing so you can listen, you stare at grey rocks with whorls of lichen on them like faces, tree-roots like snakes, the tress themselves heavy with leaves and silent. Your heart comes into your throat. Quietly, very quietly, you get back onto the path, then you take to your toes for all you are worth. This may have been the first experience of panic fear ... but you met someone there: you met yourself.
~ from "Landscape Inside" by Neil Gunn in A CELEBRATION OF THE LIGHT by John Burns
Eternal God, since silence seems to be
the voice of holiness, the only language
you speak directly,
then I pray to be steeped in it
until I fear it less and welcome it
as an usher to grace,
a narrator of sacred mysteries;
until silence cease the fretful conversations
of my mind with too little else than itself;
until silence calm my heart to an ease,
convene my senses to an anchored focus,
hush my tongue to a chastened hold;
until I discern in the silence
an answer to that necessary question
which, for the very life of me,
it has not yet occurred to me to ask;
until I am stretched alive and deep
to its dimensions, and catch,
at last and ready,
your assuring wink at me. Amen.
~ from MY HEART IN MY MOUTH by Ted Loder, thanks to Kimberly Wuest
