“I love the dark hours of my being.
My mind deepens into them.
There I can find, as in old letters,
the days of my life, already lived,
and held like a legend, and understood.
Then the knowing comes: I can open
to another life that’s wide and timeless.”
~ Rainer Maria Rilke
“Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift.”
~ Mary Oliver
“Happy the man, whose wish and care
A few paternal acres bound,
Content to breathe his native air,
In his own ground.
Whose herds with milk, whose fields with bread,
Whose flocks supply him with attire,
Whose trees in summer yield him shade,
In winter fire.
Blest, who can unconcernedly find
Hours, days, and years slide soft away,
In health of body, peace of mind,
Quiet by day,
Sound sleep by night; study and ease,
Together mixed; sweet recreation;
And innocence, which most does please,
With meditation.
Thus let me live, unseen, unknown;
Thus unlamented let me die;
Steal from the world, and not a stone
Tell where I lie.”
~ Alexander Pope
“We are here essentially to risk ourselves in the world. We are a form of invitation to others and to otherness, we are meant to hazard ourselves for the right thing, for the right woman or the right man, for a son or a daughter, for the right work or for a gift given against all the odds. And in all this continual risking the most profound courage may be found in the simple willingness to allow ourselves to be happy along the way . . .
~ David Whyte from ‘LONGING’ In CONSOLATIONS: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words.
“Somewhere we know that without silence words lose their meaning, that without listening speaking no longer heals, that without distance closeness cannot cure.” ~ Henri Nouwen
“Silence is difficult, an intimation of the end, the graveyard of fixed identities. Real silence puts any present understanding to shame; orphans us from certainty; leads us beyond the well known and accepted reality and confronts us with the unknown and previously unacceptable conversation about to break in upon our lives. Silence does not end skepticism but makes it irrelevant. Belief or unbelief or any previously rehearsed story meets the wind in the trees, the distant horn in the busy harbor, or the watching eye and listening ear of a puzzled loved one.
In silence, essence speaks to us of essence itself and asks for a kind of unilateral disarmament, our own essential nature slowly emerging as the defended periphery atomizes and falls apart. As the busy edge dissolves we begin to join the conversation through the portal of a present unknowing, robust vulnerability, revealing in the way we listen, a different ear, a more perceptive eye, an imagination refusing to come too early to a conclusion, and belonging to a different person than the one who first entered the quiet.
Out of the quiet emerges the sheer incarnational presence of the world, a presence that seems to demand a moving internal symmetry in the one breathing and listening equal to its own breathing listening elemental powers.
To become deeply silent is not to become still, but to become tidal and seasonal, a coming and going that has its own inimitable, essential character, a story not fully told, like the background of the sea, or the rain falling or the river going on, out of sight, out of our lives. Reality met on its own terms demands absolute presence, and absolute giving away, an ability to live on equal terms with the fleeting and the eternal, the hardly touchable and the fully possible, a full bodily appearance and disappearance, a rested giving in and giving up; another identity braver more generous; more silent and more here than the one looking hungrily for an easy, unearned answer.”
David Whyte ~ ‘SILENCE’ From CONSOLATIONS: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words.
“We are each surrounded by an enormous silence that can be a blessing and a help to us, but from which we often turn away in dread and fear, a silence in which the skein of reality is knitted and unraveled to be knit again, in which the perspective of a work or a life or a relationship can be enlarged and enriched. Silence is like a cradle holding our endeavors, our will and our understanding in ways that allow them to grow and thrive; a cultivated and silent spaciousness sustains us and at the same time connects us to larger worlds that, in the busyness of our daily struggle to achieve, we have yet to investigate. Silence is fearful exactly because in its spacious depths lies both the soul’s sense of rest and its possible break for freedom.”
David Whyte –Adapted from Crossing the Unknown Sea: Work as a Pilgrimage of Identity.
“They mocked me when I was singing the songs
Trying to get back to something more simple than we have
They mocked me ‘cos I told it like it was
Wrote about disappointment and greed
Wrote about what we really didn’t need in our lives
Make us feel alive and whole
Illusions and pipe dreams on the one hand
And straight reality is always cold
Saying something hard edged is off the wall
And it might seem too bold
Mocked me when it got out of hand
Nobody tried to understand
Now we got to keep it simple and that’s that
Illusions and pipe dreams on the one hand
And straight reality is always cold
Saying something hard edged is off the wall
And it just might be too bold
Well I’m down here on the running board
Where I’ve been many times before
But we got to keep it simple to save ourselves
Mocked me when I tried to get back
Said the train was completely off the track
And we got to get back to something simple to save ourselves
Whoa we got to get back to something simple just to save yourselves
Well got to get back to something simple just to save yourselves
Well you got to keep it simple, keep it simple just to – and that’s that
Whoa you got to keep it simple nowadays and that’s just that
Whoa you got to keep it simple nowadays and that’s just the way it is
And you got to keep it simple these days ‘cos that’s the way it is
Well you got to keep it, keep it simple and that’s that . . .”
~ Van Morrison
“I have come to the frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element. It is my personal approach that creates the climate. It is my daily mood that makes the weather. I possess tremendous power to make life miserable or joyous. I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration, I can humiliate or humor, hurt or heal. In all situations, it is my response that decides whether a crisis is escalated or de-escalated, and a person is humanized or de-humanized.” ~ Haim Ginott
Dr Bill Wooten 