Each day, I remind myself that we are not here to control the environment, but to learn the lessons of humility and surrender. When I am capable of that, my life takes on a wholly different meaning. I no longer feel so small and separate. It is as though I am being held by a power that is both infinitely great and infinitely tender. My love does not exist in isolation; rather it is supported and enriched by my love for this world. This kind of trust is not something of our own creation; it comes to us in a moment of extraordinary grace.
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.