We are overdosed on data and underfed on the mysterious. Our brains inflate while our souls wither. Constant interference by interpreting and explaining can distance us from life itself. God woos us into the wildness of unknowing where we are tempted by deeper senses.
Hard work and drawing up plans are helpful, but not always. We do not build our souls as much as we find them along the way. We discover them by accident as much as by intention. There is a time to take our lives in hand, but there is also a time to take our hands off our lives, and to leave what seems apparent and trust ourselves to the hidden.
There are insects always within sight, there are lights and shadows at play this very moment, but in our distraction we miss the drama that could accompany our quiet attention and give us the pieces of light we crave.
There are times when life can't help itself and, as the Psalmist wrote, "Deep calls unto deep." Then the mass of the world dances on the pinhead of our wonderment, and our breath so carefully cultivated carries us, like the wind, whithersoever it will.
Let us stay in our chairs as long as we dare, breathing gently until another rhythm takes over. Let us risk inaction, become receptive, give our thoughts to the blank wall, let our layers be peeled back, accept our dreams as true even if we must wait and wait, trusting that all human life is part of an intricate unfolding of the One Reality.
We need to sit still, let our emptiness remain empty, and wait patiently. If we fill the foreground with busy questions, reasons or proposed actions, we will miss the God who is the silent, yet ever present horizon of the world.
We find our quiet minds as we sit still with our breath, as we make small jottings in our books, and as we practice silent waiting. Then one day, "the little ways" open into broad expanses.
No matter what the weather looks like outside the window, life is warming up. Something in nature knows what it is doing; even if from time to time winter icily touches the napes of our necks with its cold fingers. . . . Woods will fill with black-birds and grackles, and swollen buds will cling like small birds to wet branches. . . . Old oaks sleep as long as they can, while the rest of creation exhibits an aching restlessness to move on. As everything begins to move, an almost forgotten song plays in our chests, the music of beginning again. The early small birds flit here and there on the rising winds; a lone, red-winged blackbird sits unmoving in the empty cherry tree . . . waiting . . . To live is to change, to move through one transition after another, to reinvent one's life, as needed. . . .
There are two silences. One silence I choose to keep when I need to hear a word that will heal, instruct, or console. The other silence comes when I have heard something so powerful, so real, that words, spoken or written, would only diminish its power.