Quotations

Certain redwood groves are holy places for me because they capture silence and light. The forest is so dense as to exclude all external noise. It is possible to ignore their silence until a single bird sings within. When the single song has died not only do I realize I have heard a sound exquisite in its simplicity, but also that I have heard it so precisely because it was embedded in pure silence.

Bede Griffiths once said to me,

"What is essential is to keep the heart always open to beauty."

What could be harder in an age like ours? And yet, it is just because our age is so harsh and brutal that it is more than ever essential to create around us, in our homes and offices and meeting places, a sacred environment. To do so is to awaken the poet in each of us, the poet and the lover of life and beauty. Creating a sacred environment is not complicated; it just requires concentration and the constant reminder that the one important thing in your life is to keep your heart open to Divine Love.

Should a greater ecological awareness begin to shape our thinking, new symbols would arise that could bind the scientific and the spiritual and would reinfuse all life with the essence of the sacred. We would be increasingly capable of envisioning the "blue, true dream" that is the living Earth luminous in the darkness of the surrounding sky.

Even as a child I knew the sacredness of personal space. I remember going behind my grandmother's house to a place where I could hide behind tall weeds. I would sit for hours in my circle of stones. That space was so special I never revealed it to even my closest playmates... Sacred spaces can be created anywhere. When I felt a need for a sacred simplicity within my city home, on a sudden inspiration, I emptied a closet and painted it white. Within this purified space, I placed a stone, a leaf, a bowl of water and a sitting cloth from the Amazon -- things special to me at that moment. I had created my own sacred space.

Your sacred space is where you can find yourself again and again.

This room was a sacred space, a place that he had chosen to make especially his own, a place redeemed from mere "use" in which he would make a conscious attempt to be at rest and to put a part of his life in order. In short, this was the evidence that the man was able to pray.

One day I stood quietly gazing through our sliding glass doors... It was a windless day and without thinking, I found myself slipping into a silent world.Then, something overcame me.Whereas silence had been a visitor, a friend with whom I communed when I chose, now silence slipped into the core of my being.Without my knowing, without even my conscious consent, silence entered me.

All life is a form of cosmic celebration. What moves the stars through the heavens, the Earth through its seasons, and human beings through stages of growth and learning -- all is celebration. Look at the birds flying here and there, the flowers blooming, and the trees changing colors in the fall. It's all celebratory. We have only to express and become, ourselves, celebration.

In the mountain, stillness surges up
to explore its own height;
In the lake, movement stands still
to contemplate its own depths.

Sacred dance expresses spiritual convictions. Dancing is the "breath of life" made visible. I feel I will dance as long as my heart stays strong and my body will move. We dance these ceremonies for the people, for our universe, for peace, love, and caring. We step softly on the earth, lifting our feet to the song and the drum. We do it to be blessed. We ask for the people to be blessed. We ask that life go on as long as it can. We ask that the animals, birds and plants be bountiful. Ceremony constitutes our world; it is our spiritual conversation. Life begets life. This is why we dance.

What is needed above all is that we should treat our social and cosmic environment AS AN ACTUAL LIVING BEING, with which we are in the most intimate reciprocal action, though without becoming merged into uniformity with it.

Silently a flower blooms,
In silence it falls away;
Yet here now, at this moment,
at this place,
the whole of the flower
the whole of the world is blooming.
This is the talk of the flower,
the truth of the blossom;
The glory of eternal life is fully
shining here.

I was learning to live in Nature, shaping my life, my everyday activities in a direct way according to the weather, the seasons, the rising and setting of the sun and moon. I was once again becoming aware of Nature's all-powerful presence. If anyone had asked me, I would still have been unable to say what might be learned from Peter asleep among his animals on the prairie as I had seen him that first summer, but I was learning it. I was learning it slowly, painfully, in solitude and silence and out of my own experience.

In order to see birds, it is necessary to become part of the silence.

As we befriend nature, our soul moves in harmony with all creation.

You need not leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen, simply wait. You need not even wait, just learn to become quiet, and still, and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked. It has no choice; it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.

I am to LISTEN. I am finding it a hard discipline: Listen to every word that is not said. Listen for silences. I have become insensitive to the power of words because I hear and see too many of them. I don't say to myself, "don't listen to words." I am already a past-master of that. I say, "listen to the silence." And I discover this: because silence seems empty of content I cannot place myself in relation to it, and therefore, I cannot place myself outside it. It is a world I enter, not a world I observe. Silent people bear this out: they seem to carry a world with them, while the unsilent always seem to be scurrying in search of one.

Truth must find an echo in the one who hears it to be recognized. Put it another way, a heart must really be listening, really wanting the truth, really wanting God.

Listening is being silent with another person in an active way. It is silently bearing with another person. Some people are silent, but they are not open and active. They are either asleep or dead within themselves. The true listener is one who is quiet and yet sensitive toward another person, open and active, receptive and alive. Listening is participating in another life in a most creative and powerful way. It is neither coercive nor pushy. Rather, it is bearing one another's burdens.

The silence of prayer is the silence of listening.

In meditation we turn within a state of silent receptivity with that open inner eye of love, that listening ear, and we let our self unfold and reveal to us whatever is necessary to the NOW of our experience. We truly drink from the well of our consciousness. The water of eternal life "gushing up" brings forth to our external world a manifestation of harmony, love, peace and health.

Listen, my child, to the silence
The undulating silence
where valleys and echoes slip,
bending foreheads
to the ground.
Listen.

The more I listen
the more profound
the silence becomes.

LISTEN is such a little, ordinary word that it is easily passed over. Yet we all know the pain of not being listened to, of not being heard. In a way, not to be heard is not to exist. This can be the plight of the very young and the very old, the very sick, the "confused", and all too frequently, the dying -- literally no one in their lives has time or patience to listen. Or perhaps we lack courage to hear them.

We forget how intimate listening is, alive and fluid in its mutuality. It involves interaction even if no one moves a muscle and even if the listener says nothing. Vulnerability is shared when silence is shared.