I gather this garment
Of silence about me,
Stillness that used to be
Threatening, its needles
Of fear lurking,
Probing wounds of my past scars to my psyche.
Now in the hands of Love
These needles have knitted
A silence so beautiful
That nothing
Can hurt. I draw skeins
Of silence with this healing garment about me,
As its stitches permeate
The crevices of my soul
Whispering, Peace.
Be still—and know:
Now all that would harm you
Is knitted to warm you.
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.