The discovery that God is as close to us as water in a sponge, or that God is in our body's veins and arteries as well as in the veins and arteries of our lives, is the fundamental music accompanying the entire dance of the spirit... Through every movement and every gestures, every turn and return, every leap forward and every silent rest, the music remains -- not only beneath and over and under and next to and within. In the trees and in the lakes, in the laughter and in the tears, in the animals and in the sun, in the soil, the fire, the air, the water. In the lure and the invitation ... the responding, the searching, the finding, the remembering. And in every one of us.
Silence is the training ground for the art of listening. Engaging the silence may be one of the most important and productive things you can do for spiritual deepening.
I know for us compulsive, productive, extroverted types, this is a tall order. The bottom line is -- it's worth it. But we have to believe that it really matters. In our culture, silence and stillness have been equated with wasting time, doing nothing, being lazy. NOT TRUE. Think of it this way -- the silence of meditation is not the silence of a graveyard; it is the silence of a garden growing.