An inner city priest went to the home of a poor old lady in the parish. She was dying. When the priest came to her side, she said, "Don't talk and don't run." She seemed to want to die fully appreciative of her life in God, which was too deep for any consoling words at that point. And she wanted to die appreciative of the human community that incarnates God's presence on this plane of existence, which was too deep for words but not for silent, prayerful human presence. That is contemplative dying.
...We can approach all of the myriad little ego deaths, all the ways we don't get what we want (as opposed to what we need) in our lives, in the same way as that woman faced physical death... We need to leave room for the silence that can free the wonder, as well as for words.
What else should our lives be but a continual series of beginnings, of painful settings out into the unknown, pushing off from the edges of consciousness into the mystery of what we have not yet become, except in dreams that blow in from out there bearing the fragrance of islands we have not yet sighted in our waking hours, as in voyaging sometimes the first blossoming branches of our next landfall come bumping against the keel, even in the dark, whole days before the real land rises to meet us.