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.
Saints are not saints by chance, nor by choice, but by necessity — because there is a hunger in their soul which can not be satisfied by anything less than the divine.