Good Morning Digital Neighbors! I will be going away on Retreat this week, a silent one. I will of course be off-line until my return on Thursday evening and then will resume my morning ramblings and postings. I will be posting an invitation to the Sunday Speakeasy later this afternoon and then after hosting that, hitting the road to a few days of silence, prayer, rest and pondering. You will be in my prayers.
Before I exit - here is some fine thoughts by David Whyte on silence from his wonderful book - Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words.
SILENCE is frightening. Silence is not stillness, but tidal and seasonal movement left to itself; an intimation of the end, the graveyard of fixed identities. Real silence puts any present understanding to shame, orphans us from certainty, leads us beyond the well-known and accepted reality, and confronts us with the unknown and previously unacceptable conversation about to break in upon our lives.
Silence does not end scepticism but makes it irrelevant. Belief or unbelief or any previously rehearsed story meets the wind in the trees, the distant horn in the busy harbour, or the watching eye and listening ear of a puzzled loved one.
In silence, essence speaks to us of essence itself and asks for a kind of unilateral disarmament, our own essential nature slowly emerging as the defended periphery atomises and falls apart. As the busy edge dissolves we begin to join the conversation through the portal of a present unknowing, robust vulnerability, revealing in the way we listen, a different ear, a more perceptive eye, an imagination refusing to come too early to a conclusion and belonging to a different person than the one who first entered the quiet.
Out of the quiet emerges the sheer incarnational presence of the world, a presence that seems to demand a moving, internal symmetry in the one breathing and listening equal to its own breathing, listening elemental powers.
To become deeply silent is not to become still, but to become tidal and seasonal, a coming and going that has its own inimitable, essential character, a story not fully told, like the background of the sea, or the rain falling, or the river going on, out of sight, out of our lives.
Reality met on its own terms demands absolute presence, and absolute giving away, an ability to live on equal terms with the fleeting and the eternal, the hardly touchable and the fully possible, a full bodily appearance and disappearance, a rested giving in and giving up; another identity braver, more generous and more here than the one looking hungrily for the easy, unearned answer.
I can't thank Zoom @zoomerqc enough for this book - it has become a goldmine of meditation. This line on silence stands out:
As the busy edge dissolves we begin to join the conversation through the portal of a present unknowing, robust vulnerability, revealing in the way we listen, a different ear, a more perceptive eye, an imagination refusing to come too early to a conclusion and belonging to a different person than the one who first entered the quiet.
A different ear, a more perceptive eye, an imagination refusing to come too early to a conclusion - those open the door to the Mysterium, to the Immensely Subtle and the Deafening Whisper of the Master who invites me to sit with myself and with Him. I hope I can open my heart more completely to the gifts offered at this retreat, to surrender to the Mysterious, to listen to the silence, to humbly confront myself and find that place of YES that gives the Divine the freedom to act in my life.
Tolmie Park - Lacey WA - Steve Roberts
