In the silence of our prayerful hearts, we stand empty and are so able to hear God knocking at the door and longing to come inside. Too many words insulate us from our inner poverty. Too many words drown out the sound of God's voice at the door.
There is the silence in which everything exists, and then there is the noise in my head that I have come to take as the natural background to my life. It has occurred to me that perhaps the trick is to begin to see the silence as the background and the noise as moving across it. The silence, the plain existence of things, is what is real; the thoughts are clouds.