Today I was walking with some friends in Armstrong Redwoods Park and I was astonished at those trees. The more I looked at them, the more I came to appreciate them. It was completely still, unlike our tropical forests in India, where elephants trumpet, tigers roar, and there is a constant symphony of sound. Here everything was still, and I enjoyed the silence so much that I remembered these lines of John Keats. It is a perfect simile for the silence of the mind, when all personal conflicts are resolved, when all selfish desires come to rest. All of us are looking for this absolute peace, this inward, healing silence in the redwood forest of the mind. When we find it, we will become small forces for peace wherever we go.
People today in a competitive corporate secular world are not encouraged to take up listening AS A SPIRITUAL PRACTICE. It requires tremendous life forces TO LISTEN, to become inwardly still, to suspend self-talk and arrogant critical and judgmental tendencies and to be present to another person or reality. ...The rudiments of spiritual (or other) knowledge may be received through the ear, but when these ideas penetrate the heart and are apprehended by the heart's eye, then HEARING BECOMES VISION.
~ Therese Schroeder-Scheker in SO THAT YOU MAY BE ONE by Joa Bolendas
The gift of love is nothing short of a miracle, and the same is true for the experience of the singer who works with prayer: sung prayer is one of the many ways in which love is made audible and brought into the fullness of life... In sung prayer, one must risk burning and one must risk soaring, nothing less. Whether one falls in love or whether one sings in love, surrender is to be and to radiate love. In the case of the musician, this is done through the medium of music. In the case of the truly musical person, this can even be achieved through a silence which radiates interior harmony and, by extension, brings peace to those surrounding them.
~ Therese Schroeder-Sheker in SO THAT YOU MAY BE ONE by Joa Bolendas
