What a gift each morning to encounter some part of nature... It is a pure gift of beauty, of life. The sunrise can be a reminder of the day's gift because it comes unbidden. We don't produce it. The light is given. The world is reborn each morning, and we are given a whole new time of opportunity. Even if the difficulties are the same we had yesterday, we can tackle them in a new way. Primordial freshness is renewed each morning.
Have you ever been "stricken with silence"? If so, you have tasted the ineffable; you have had a mystical experience. Silence is too often defined as "the absence of something" when it is much more than that. Silence is also a search for something, a search for the depths, for the source. Many of the mystical awakenings experienced by astronauts and cosmonauts in space have been triggered by the cosmic silence they have encountered there. Similar things happen to persons swimming in the depths of the sea or spelunking in the caves of Mother Earth. Silence moves people. That is why it is so essential to meditation practices, including the art of listening to our images. Being, one might say, is silent. We must embrace silence in order to experience being. Then -- and only then -- does it speak deep truths to us. As Rilke says: "Being-silent. Who keeps innerly silent, touches the roots of speech."