One might say, I had decided to marry the silent forest. The sweet dark warmth of the whole world will have to be my wife. Out of the heart of that dark warmth comes the secret that is heard only in silence, but it is the root of all the secrets that are whispered by all the lovers in their beds all over the world. So perhaps I have an obligation to preserve the stillness, the silence, the poverty, the virginal point of pure nothingness which is at the center point of all other loves. I attempt to cultivate this plant without comment in the middle of the night and water it with psalms and prophecies in silence. It becomes the most rare of all the trees in the garden, at once the primordial paradise tree, the axis mundi, the cosmic axle, and the Cross.
After the service was over, I realized in reviewing my life that I no longer had anything to forgive — no grudges, resentments, memories of pain suffered at the hands of others. When I told my director, she said, "Molly, do you realize what a great grace you've been given?" Well, no, I hadn't, not until she said that, and only as I have reflected on it since. It is a great grace. And it's one that I'm not going to poke around in to try to scare up some lost memory or past injury in order to test its reality.