Throughout my whole life, during every minute of it, the world has been gradually lighting up and blazing before my eyes until it has come to surround me, entirely lit up from within.
~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin in THE HEART OF THE MATTER
I am to LISTEN. I am finding it a hard discipline: Listen to every word that is not said. Listen for silences. I have become insensitive to the power of words because I hear and see too many of them. I don't say to myself, "don't listen to words." I am already a past-master of that. I say, "listen to the silence." And I discover this: because silence seems empty of content I cannot place myself in relation to it, and therefore, I cannot place myself outside it. It is a world I enter, not a world I observe. Silent people bear this out: they seem to carry a world with them, while the unsilent always seem to be scurrying in search of one.