Music reproduces for us the intimate essence, the temp and energy, of our spiritual being; our tranquility and our restlessness, our animation and our discouragement, our vitality and our weakness -- all, in fact, of the fine shades of dynamic variation of our inner life.
My soul sings, Beloved, You are the melody.
You are the strings on which I play.
You are the One for whom I sing.
You are all that is and my soul seeks Oneness with You.
Teach me the music of life, Beloved.
Teach me to play the instrument of my Being,
and of this world, that I might see and hear
and know more clearly the nearness of your Presence.
I would sing into the Oneness that You are.
The entire world is a musical instrument, the pole of the world celestial is intersected where this heavenly chord is divided by the spiritual sun. Earthly music is an echo of this cosmic harmony: it is a relic of heaven.
Be like that bird
Who, pausing in flight,
Feels the bough give way
Beneath her feet
And yet sings
Knowing she hath wings.
The gift of love is nothing short of a miracle, and the same is true for the experience of the singer who works with prayer: sung prayer is one of the many ways in which love is made audible and brought into the fullness of life... In sung prayer, one must risk burning and one must risk soaring, nothing less. Whether one falls in love or whether one sings in love, surrender is to be and to radiate love. In the case of the musician, this is done through the medium of music. In the case of the truly musical person, this can even be achieved through a silence which radiates interior harmony and, by extension, brings peace to those surrounding them.
When our two souls stand up erect and strong,
Face to face, silent, drawing nigh and nigher,
Until the lengthening wings break into fire
At either ... curved point, -- what bitter wrong
Can the earth do to us, that we should not long
Be here contented? Think! In mounting higher,
The angels would press upon us, and aspire
To drop some golden orb of perfect song
Into our deep, dear silence.
Music is the breathing of our soul and consciousness. It is through music that the soul manifests itself in the world. When our higher consciousness is awakened, when we develop our capacity to perceive the subtler realities, we will begin to hear the great and glorious symphony that reverberates throughout space from one end of the universe to the other, and we will comprehend the deepest meaning of life.
Listen for the divine music called the silence of the Spirit.
Within us, around us, the music of the spheres unfolds in rhythms celestial and melodies terrestrial... In the beginning was the creative sound, symphony, harmony and melody, every pattern and structure ever to be. The Word that was with God has not ceased to be; this very moment, it holds suspended within its vibratory magnificence, every atom, molecule, cell and organism. It sings the very earth into being. The sun, moon and planets share in a symphony of the heavens that includes every comet, asteroid and star-system in our galaxy -- and in a billion others.
Each individual who restores trust in God sounds a note in harmonic resonance with the entire cosmos. This magnifies the vibrations of the Holy Place.
The silence of landscape conceals vast presence. Place is not simply location. A place is a profound individuality. Its surface texture of grass and stone is blessed by rain, wind, and light. With complete attention, landscape celebrates the liturgy of the seasons, giving itself unreservedly. The shape of a landscape is an ancient and silent form of consciousness. Mountains are huge contemplatives. Rivers and streams offer voice; they are the tears of the earth's joy and despair. The earth is full of soul.
Sacred space is the playground of the soul. To create a sacred space, we start from nothing. We define its parameters, clear it of accoutrements, and bless the emptiness. Then we bring to the space only that which leads us into harmony with our own center, fortifies us, reflects our intention, reminds us of the reason we are there. Our sacred space is defined in such a way that everything in it becomes a metaphor for the journey out of the secular realm and into the spiritual, when we disengage from the limits of time and temporal concerns.
Certain redwood groves are holy places for me because they capture silence and light. The forest is so dense as to exclude all external noise. It is possible to ignore their silence until a single bird sings within. When the single song has died not only do I realize I have heard a sound exquisite in its simplicity, but also that I have heard it so precisely because it was embedded in pure silence.
When we sit prayerfully in silence and solitude we are entering the desert, our desert. In this sacred space, the goal is not to hide from others, devoid of pain, or to hold ourselves apart from and above the community in which we live. It is to receive the grace to learn to face ourselves directly so we can learn to live ordinariness, to live ethically and generously with others.
Bede Griffiths once said to me,
"What is essential is to keep the heart always open to beauty."
What could be harder in an age like ours? And yet, it is just because our age is so harsh and brutal that it is more than ever essential to create around us, in our homes and offices and meeting places, a sacred environment. To do so is to awaken the poet in each of us, the poet and the lover of life and beauty. Creating a sacred environment is not complicated; it just requires concentration and the constant reminder that the one important thing in your life is to keep your heart open to Divine Love.
I want to remind myself and others that our homes can become sacred places, filled with life and meaning.
Should a greater ecological awareness begin to shape our thinking, new symbols would arise that could bind the scientific and the spiritual and would reinfuse all life with the essence of the sacred. We would be increasingly capable of envisioning the "blue, true dream" that is the living Earth luminous in the darkness of the surrounding sky.
Your arched aisles wooed me near, a place of peaceful rest amidst my struggles.
Even as a child I knew the sacredness of personal space. I remember going behind my grandmother's house to a place where I could hide behind tall weeds. I would sit for hours in my circle of stones. That space was so special I never revealed it to even my closest playmates... Sacred spaces can be created anywhere. When I felt a need for a sacred simplicity within my city home, on a sudden inspiration, I emptied a closet and painted it white. Within this purified space, I placed a stone, a leaf, a bowl of water and a sitting cloth from the Amazon -- things special to me at that moment. I had created my own sacred space.
A sacred space is a place where you feel comfortable and protected. You are free from outside influences to meditate, pray, or just sit quietly and be.
I looked at the gentle blue-eyed Englishman and asked him how he managed to meditate and concentrate in such a noisy, busy place.
"It's not difficult," he replied. "I simply incorporate the sounds into my meditation. It becomes a kind of rhythm. It doesn't disturb my peace and quiet at all."
I recognized that the quiet place, the sacred place, has to be within the person first of all.
This room was a sacred space, a place that he had chosen to make especially his own, a place redeemed from mere "use" in which he would make a conscious attempt to be at rest and to put a part of his life in order. In short, this was the evidence that the man was able to pray.
All life is a form of cosmic celebration. What moves the stars through the heavens, the Earth through its seasons, and human beings through stages of growth and learning -- all is celebration. Look at the birds flying here and there, the flowers blooming, and the trees changing colors in the fall. It's all celebratory. We have only to express and become, ourselves, celebration.
The earth is languishing for more contemplatives. We have not even been courteous to her, much less respectful. We have never sincerely asked forgiveness for our massive exploitation of her. We have failed to see that she is numinous and to treat her with proper deference as our mother. It is time now for the child to mother the mother. Nothing less than a mysticism that can perceive the diaphany of the divine at the heart of matter itself is capable of experiencing mystical union with nature. Even if we have not had a vivid mystical experience, we can learn in prayer to meditate on what the union could imply.
In the mountain, stillness surges up
to explore its own height;
In the lake, movement stands still
to contemplate its own depths.
Sacred dance expresses spiritual convictions. Dancing is the "breath of life" made visible. I feel I will dance as long as my heart stays strong and my body will move. We dance these ceremonies for the people, for our universe, for peace, love, and caring. We step softly on the earth, lifting our feet to the song and the drum. We do it to be blessed. We ask for the people to be blessed. We ask that life go on as long as it can. We ask that the animals, birds and plants be bountiful. Ceremony constitutes our world; it is our spiritual conversation. Life begets life. This is why we dance.
I am silent now. It is not an empty silence. It is a natural silence. The silence of wind, of waves, of breath, of the beating of my heart. It is a space in my soul for being aware. It is a silence that listens, gently, taking notice. I can simply Be. I am the space within. I am the round sky and the firm earth. The waves of life wash through me, and the wind of the spirit cries in my heart.
What is needed above all is that we should treat our social and cosmic environment AS AN ACTUAL LIVING BEING, with which we are in the most intimate reciprocal action, though without becoming merged into uniformity with it.
As the human species awakens to itself as a collection of immortal souls learning together, care for the environment and the earth will become a matter of the heart, the natural response of souls moving toward their full potential.
Silently a flower blooms,
In silence it falls away;
Yet here now, at this moment,
at this place,
the whole of the flower
the whole of the world is blooming.
This is the talk of the flower,
the truth of the blossom;
The glory of eternal life is fully
shining here.
No matter how deeply I go down
into myself,
My God is dark, and like a webbing
made of a hundred roots
that drink in silence.
I was learning to live in Nature, shaping my life, my everyday activities in a direct way according to the weather, the seasons, the rising and setting of the sun and moon. I was once again becoming aware of Nature's all-powerful presence. If anyone had asked me, I would still have been unable to say what might be learned from Peter asleep among his animals on the prairie as I had seen him that first summer, but I was learning it. I was learning it slowly, painfully, in solitude and silence and out of my own experience.
Is everything holy? I learn that when the upper limb of a cottonwood tree is cut crosswise, the grain reveals a perfect five-pointed star. The star is understood as a sign of the Great Spirit's presence and the tree's holy nature. Even the breeze blowing through the cottonwood leaves is understood to be its prayer... Who would ever notice, in my busy life, that a star is secreted in a cottonwood tree? It makes me wonder, are there equally hidden depths inside of me?
Entering the world of the spirit, I saw a vision which I could not adequately describe if I lived for a thousand years. The central part was a broad highway lined with beautiful trees radiating all the colors of the rainbow. Each tree bore all the fruits known to me and many others I had never seen before. The nine-pointed star was situated at the end of the road and drew me towards it and in the distance there were parks and gardens with rare trees from many countries and friends of all colors and creeds. Dominating the garden of delight was The Tree of Life with leaves for the healing of the Nations.
Holy listening, to "listen" another's soul into life, into a condition of disclosure and discovery, may be almost the greatest service that any human being ever performs for another (or oneself).
You need not leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen, simply wait. You need not even wait, just learn to become quiet, and 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.
When you experience both Silence and the Word deeply, you see that the Word comes from the Silence and the Silence is in the Word. When you really listen to God speaking to you in each moment, you see that what speaks to you is the Silence.
I am to LISTEN. I am finding it a hard discipline: Listen to every word that is not said. Listen for silences. I have become insensitive to the power of words because I hear and see too many of them. I don't say to myself, "don't listen to words." I am already a past-master of that. I say, "listen to the silence." And I discover this: because silence seems empty of content I cannot place myself in relation to it, and therefore, I cannot place myself outside it. It is a world I enter, not a world I observe. Silent people bear this out: they seem to carry a world with them, while the unsilent always seem to be scurrying in search of one.
This was my first conscious experience of listening to Gaia, even though I didn't call it that then or hear an actual voice... I have come to learn that there are many ways of listening. One may hear an internal or external voice, feel a body sensation, or simply just "know" with that intuitive understanding that is beyond words. However, I continue to describe this experience as "listening" because we have forgotten how to be silent and listen to ourselves, one another, and the earth.
Truth must find an echo in the one who hears it to be recognized. Put it another way, a heart must really be listening, really wanting the truth, really wanting God.