Maybe we need more silence.
Maybe we simply need now
and then to look up at the
silent stars and lose ourselves
to be set free.
Quotations
Silence is an active waiting animated by faith and love.
Love and Living
Silence has many dimensions. It can be a regression and an escape, a loss of self, or it can be presence, awareness, unification, self-discovery. Negative silence blurs and confuses our identity, and we lapse into daydreams or diffuse anxieties. Positive silence pulls us together and makes us realize who we are, who we might be, and the distance between the two. Hence, positive silence implies a choice, and what Paul Tillich called the "courage to be."
The purpose of silence is a directed stillness.
Every great activity and event, every true encounter with the Divine must begin by our turning off the mind and turning within to that place where true wisdom resides. Ideas are born in the quiet of the mind. Nature gives us the model for our spiritual endeavors, teaching us to silence outer confusion and noise so Spirit's soft voice can be heard. We encounter the Divine in the stillness at the center of our being.
Inviting Silence
We do not need to be experts or geniuses to remember that all of existence is precious. We do not need cathedrals to remind ourselves to experience the sacred. We need only to be deeply respectful of what is fundamentally true; and that is what we rediscover when we center ourselves in silence.
As the mind becomes silent the soul becomes eloquent.
365 Prescriptions for the Soul
There is a silence into which the world cannot intrude. There is an ancient peace you carry in your heart and have not lost.
Spirituality of the Handmaid
If the heart of prayer is listening, what is it we listen to when we pray? The obvious answer is God's voice, yet great care is needed lest we presume the divine voice is like an ordinary human one. The essence of God's voice is silence...To be silent is to empty oneself of the din of transitory distractions so that one becomes fully receptive to the silence that always and everywhere underlies them. The silence thus cultivated is not a void so much as an expectant readiness, a sensitive receptivity, to the stillness hidden in the noise of daily life.
Learn to get in touch with the silence within yourself and know that everything in this life has a purpose.
Words to Live By
Today I was walking with some friends in Armstrong Redwoods Park and I was astonished at those trees. The more I looked at them, the more I came to appreciate them. It was completely still, unlike our tropical forests in India, where elephants trumpet, tigers roar, and there is a constant symphony of sound. Here everything was still, and I enjoyed the silence so much that I remembered these lines of John Keats. It is a perfect simile for the silence of the mind, when all personal conflicts are resolved, when all selfish desires come to rest. All of us are looking for this absolute peace, this inward, healing silence in the redwood forest of the mind. When we find it, we will become small forces for peace wherever we go.
And then there crept a little noiseless noise among the leaves,
Born of the very sigh that silence heaves.
As one contemplates, penetrating deeper and deeper into the nature of reality, one leaves the sensible world behind, transcends the subject/object mode of perception, and experiences one's soul.
There is immense power in stillness...You may not see or feel the operations of this silent force, but be assured it is always working mightily, and will work for you, if you only get your spirit still enough to be carried along by the currents of its power.
You do not need to leave your room... Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait. Do not even wait, be quite still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked. It has no choice. It will roll in ecstasy at your feet.
There is a voice that doesn't use words. Listen.
Messages from the Ancestors: Wisdom for the Way
God's breath is heard in quietness and felt in stillness. Beware the noises and clamor of ego which drown out the divine whisper.
Listen to the silence as it echoes around you,
Ancient spirits dance to it.
Walk in a Relaxed Way
Walking, I am listening to a deeper way. Suddenly all my ancestors are behind me. Be still, they say. Watch and listen.
If we have been pleased with life, we should not be displeased with death, since it comes from the hand of the same master.
Dirge without Music
I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground. So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind: Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned With lilies and laurel they go; but I am not resigned.
You will only arrive at what you are aiming to achieve through the cultivation of two fundamental attitudes of soul. You must nurture a true love for what you represent, and also an insightful love of humanity. Be quite clear that if these two conditions are not met, you may be able to present material ever so logically, you may be able to demonstrate exceptional cleverness, and you will still not achieve anything.
What can we gain by sailing to the moon if we are not able to cross the abyss that separates us from ourselves? This is the most important of all voyages of discovery, and without it all the rest are not only useless but disastrous.
When my friend (Kerri) died, I looked at her face...thinking, "She is not here." Yet she lived in the words of the eulogy written by her husband. He asked, "Did you (ever) know her? She read stories to the children, and every night after they were asleep she went out and knelt in the backyard under the stars." If we wish to know where soul exists, look to where one puts one's energy. Life lived well is a transformative art, and art is what we do for the love of doing it. All living art is about spirit and life making soul.
Every day you have less reason to not give yourself away.
The soul is highest, noblest, worthiest when it is lowest, humblest, and gentlest.
A Father's Journey
Rebecca's baptism just moments before her death exemplified the existential bridge from private to universal suffering. That water, flesh and blood blessing fell like a stone into a still lake, sending out ripples of grace through Rebecca to everyone, and from everyone to her, from and to the heart of all creation in God...To love in the presence of death is to cultivate humus, the ground that brings new life. And the ground is God, ever new.
No moon tonight
I light a candle
and listen to the
dark
Rural Philosophy
To withdraw gracefully from the public stage and by securing a season of virtuous repose after a life of action – to place a kind of sacred interval between this world and the next, is a piece of practical wisdom which I fear is in few hands.
A door has closed behind me
Another opens wide.
Before me lies a welcome mat,
With faith, I step inside.
Quaker Prayer
We give them back to you, dear God,
Who gavest them to us.
Yet as Thou didst not lose them in giving,
So we have not lost them by their return.
For what is thine is ours always, if we are thine.
And life is eternal and love is immortal,
And death is only a horizon,
And a horizon is nothing more
Than the limit of our sight.
New Age
Someone who loves us can often see our soul potential more clearly than we can ourselves. When this happens, it has a catalytic effect; it invites and encourages dormant, undeveloped parts of us to come forth and find expression. Indeed, we are often most strongly attracted to those who we sense "will make us live—and die—most intensely... the experience of soul always contains this double yearning: to feel the meaning and beauty of our individual life, and to connect with the larger, universal currents of life flowing through us.
The Return of the Mother
To be human is to be born into a dance in which every animate or inanimate, visible or invisible being is also dancing. Every step of this dance is printed in light; its energy is adoration, its rhythm is praise. Pain, desolution, and destruction in this full and unified sacred vision are not separate from the dance, but are instead essential energies of its transformative unfolding. Death itself cannot shatter the dance, because death is the lifespring of its fertility, the mother of all its changing splendor. If we could bring ourselves to open to this vision, we would undergo a revolution of the heart.
I am not going to die.
I'm going home like a shooting star.
If I knew for certain that I should die next week, I would still be able to sit at my desk all week and study with perfect equanimity, for I know now that life and death make a meaningful whole.
Cry Hope, Cry Pain
Every one of us has a "good work" to do in life, which accomplishes something needed in the world while completing something in us. When it is finished a new work emerges which will help us to make green a desert place, as well as to scale another mountain in ourselves. The work we do in the world, when it is a true vocation, always corresponds in some mysterious way to the work that goes on within us.
The days come and go like muffled and veiled figures sent from a distant friendly party, but they say nothing, and if we do not use the gifts they bring, they carry them as silently away.
Let the beauty we love be what we do. There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.
If we just worry about the big picture, we are powerless. So my secret is to start right away doing whatever little work I can do. I try to give joy to one person in the morning, and remove the suffering of one person in the afternoon. If you and your friends do not despise the small work, a million people will remove a lot of suffering.
Love and Work
I used to think that the goal of life is to do equally well in the spheres of work and love. Now I know there is only one sphere. What matters is the way I treat everyone I encounter in the course of my days: my wife, my child, a friend, a colleague, a secretary, a textbook salesperson, a complaining student. What's important is to treat each one with courtesy, with respect...with love...We're all connected in a web of love.
We are here to do.
And through doing to learn;
and through learning to know;
and through knowing to experience wonder;
and through wonder to attain wisdom;
and through wisdom to find simplicity;
and through simplicity to give attention;
and through attention
to see what needs to be done.
The outward work can never be small if the inward one is great, and the outward work can never be great if the inward is small or of little worth.
Voices of our Ancestors
Sometimes in the busy world one develops what we call the illness of being two-hearted... It is where you want to do and have the ability to do but you don't do, and you argue with yourself about it. Good to be of one mind, one heart, and to see the ifs, ands, buts, and possibilities only as thoughts, without attachment, keeping clear your goal of being all that you can be, understanding the Mystery, seeing the truth as it is. To see the essence of what is, to perceive the harmony and live it, is to accomplish the "good life."
The Man Who Planted Trees
The oaks of 1910 were now ten years old and taller than either of us. It was such an impressive sight that I was struck dumb, and, as he never spoke, we spent the whole day in silence walking through his forest. When I reminded myself that all this was the work of the hand and soul of this one man, with no mechanical help, it seemed to me that after all we might be as effective as God in tasks other than destruction.
Animal-Speak
Squirrels can teach us balance within the circle of gathering and giving out... As masters of preparing, they also are reminders that in our quest for our goals, we do well to make time to socialize and play. Work and play go hand in hand, or the work will create problems and become more difficult and less fruitful.
In the Presence of Fear
In an essay on the origin of civilization in traditional cultures, A.K. Coomaraswamy wrote that "the principle of justice is the same throughout: that each member of the community should perform the task for which he or she is fitted by nature." The two ideas, justice and vocation, are inseparable. It is by way of the principle and practice of vocation that sanctity and reverence enter into human economy. It was thus possible for traditional cultures to conceive that "to work is to pray."
Quaker Healers
Quiet helps us find what we are passionate about. In that quiet, ask what it is you should be doing. Service is spiritual work or, to some, work of reverence. First, you have to uncover what it is you have a reverence for…what it is you love. It may not look like something that is grand or very important, but if you can do a good thing, a small thing on a regular basis, and keep going, it will shine a light. It will draw other light to you.
Going Toward the Light
If personal transformation is global transformation, then each of us in our best creative moments, transforms the whole of humanity...Wealth, success, fame: none of these matter if your heart is not dancing and celebrating each moment of your life.
The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet.
Heron Dance
I think that those who serve most potently, work on levels of consciousness that have to do with radiating love — maybe God's love... It is important that you have a brain and use it, but that is secondary. The basic premise is that you allow something to come through you. Then you use your intelligence to give your heart's work discipline and logic. But the transformative energy, that which can change events, that heals, that helps, that serves, comes from somewhere deep inside.