Darkness deserves gratitude. It is the alleluia point at which we learn to understand that all growth does not take place in the sunlight.
~ from UNCOMMON GRATITUDE by Joan Chittister
There is the silence in which everything exists, and then there is the noise in my head that I have come to take as the natural background to my life. It has occurred to me that perhaps the trick is to begin to see the silence as the background and the noise as moving across it. The silence, the plain existence of things, is what is real; the thoughts are clouds.