Lying on my back under the starlit sky, I gave myself up completely to the lovely sounds of Irish music. It was a magical sound, I said, beating with my fingers happily and humming the tunes. The music stopped for a few minutes while the musicians rested. As I lay motionless in the silence of the night, I listened to the quiet voice of my heart. "Music is free," it said. "Music belongs to everyone. You only have to listen." Some knowledge is full of bliss.
When the prayer makers thought of the soul as a garden, they liked to picture in it the Creator setting a breeze into motion and the flowers of the soul to dancing. On a gray morning or a dark night, in late autumn or in barren years as much as in brighter times, the imagination of such dancing signals that divine activity is all around us, only waiting to be recognized. May the prayer and the dreams that goodness might displace everything that is flawed in the soul come to be realized for another dancing day.
~ from WHEN TRUE SIMPLICITY IS GAINED by Martin and Micah Marty
