To live a contemplative life is to be open enough to see, free enough to hear, real enough to respond. It is a life, and so it has its own rhythms of darkness, of dying-rising. Simply enough, it is a live of grateful receptivity, or wordless awe, of silent simplicity.
Listen, my child, to the silence
The undulating silence
where valleys and echoes slip,
bending foreheads
to the ground.
Listen.