Quotations

Inner peace is not found by staying on the surface of life, or by attempting to escape from life through any means. Inner peace is found by facing life squarely, solving its problems, and delving as far beneath the surface as possible to discover its verities and realities.

May the peace of each moment enfold you in rhythm with heaven’s celestial heartfelt beat.
 

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.

Within us is the soul of the whole, the wise silence, the universal beauty, the eternal One.

Silence receives too little appreciation, silence being a higher, rarer thing than sound. Silence implies inner riches, and a savouring of impressions. Babies value this too. They lie silent, and one can suppose them asleep but look closer, and with eyes wide open they are sparkling like jewels in the dark. Silence is beyond many of us, and hardly taken into account as one of life's favours. It can be sacred. Its implications are unstatable. It has a superiority that makes the interruption of the spoken word crude, rendering small what was infinite.

The phoebe sits on her nest
Hour after hour,
Day after day,
Waiting for life to burst out
From under her warmth.
Can I weave a nest of silence,
weave it of listening,
listening, listening,
Layer upon layer?
But one must first become small,
Nothing but a presence,
Attentive as a nesting bird,
Proffering no slightest wish
Toward anything
that might happen or be given,
Only the warm, faithful waiting,
contained in one’s smallness.
Beyond the question,
the silence.
Before the answer,
the silence.

I am discovering that Silence is not a concept, an idea, not the familiar "absence of sound." Instead, I "enter" silence as if I were to open a door, cross a threshold, and enter a room. Silence is substantive, tactile, like material. I feel its layers. It has depth like water, shallow or deep. I immerse myself in it. It is like water, supportive. I lay back in it. It is buoyant or it can draw me down. I think about whether or not it has a bottom, a ground. Perhaps its bottom turns into a top at some point, just as going east eventually leads west. I feel secure in the way it totally envelops. It is pleasurable yet mysterious.

Mark Van Doren wrote about "the [silent] web of the world, how thick and how thin, ancient and full of grace." What a lovely vocation for me to spend the rest of my years playing with the secrets of that shining place.

Silence touches us in so many ways: as something which offers sanctuary and tranquility, as something which brings us into touch with the inner depths which elude us in the hurly-burly of our everyday lives, as a source of joy, as an inspiration for art, literature or music, and because it awakens us to the present moment which can only be fully experienced with a mind that is free of preconceptions. These encounters can be the source of a wonderful clarity.

Realize that each soul is related to you.
When you recognize that everyone is part of you,
you will find that you cannot
withdraw from one another.

It does not matter what name you attach to it, but your consciousness must ascend to the point through which you view the universe with your God-centered nature. The feeling accompanying this experience is that of complete oneness with the Universal Whole. One merges into a euphoria of absolute unity with all life . . .

Survival is the second law of life.
The first is that we are all one.

A single Spirit fills infinity. It is that of God, whom nothing limits or divides, who is everywhere entire and nowhere confined

This will be my solitude, to be separated from myself so that I am able to love You alone, to love You so much that I no longer realize I am loving anything. I no longer desire to be myself, but to find myself transformed in You, so that there is no "myself" but only Yourself. That is when I will be what You have willed to make me from all eternity: not myself, but Love.

The mere idea of oneness is not the same as the experience of oneness. The actual experience makes all the difference.

Indivisible oneness is the creative energy that turns a seed into a maple tree, or a watermelon or a human being or anything else that's alive. It's invisible, omnipresent, and absolutely indivisible. We can't divide oneness. Meditation offers us the closest experience we can have of rejoining our Source and being in the oneness at the same time that we're embodied. This means we have to tame our ego.
 

What a gift is the recognition of our multiple streams of time! Most of us have had some experience of breaking out of the monochronic monotony of one-thing-afteranother. Time flies; time crawls or stands still. We regularly experience the
spectrum of party time, hanging out time, condensed time, wasting time, scheduled time, falling in love time, anxiety time, creative time, borning time, dying time, meditation time, timeless time. Ecstasy and terror have their own temporal cadences, and in high creative moments as well as in mystical experience, the categories of time are strained by the tension of eternity.

How many oceans have vanished in sand, how much sand has been prayed hard in the stone, how much time has been wept away in the singing horn of the seashells, how much mortal abandonment in the fishes' pearl eyes, how many morning trumpets in the coral, how many star patterns in crystal, how much seed of laughter in the gulls' throat, how many threads of longing for home have been traversed on the nightly course of the constellations, how much fertile earth for the root of the word: You -- behind all the crashing patterns of the secrets You --

Sabbath time. Sabbatical time. Jubilee time. Time to rest, to delight in what is given, to breathe in the beauty. Time to be fallow, to heal wounds, forgive, regenerate. Time to restore the world to its primal pattern. Time to anticipate a new world in which justice, mercy, and peace truly flourish. Time that anticipates the end and fullness of all time when tears, mourning, and death itself will yield to the bountiful, blooming garden of God’s own time.