Quiet

Over the past days and months there has been a lot of political noise. so much noise that I yearn for quiet, both within and without. Over the past several days we have had an abundance of snow and yet when snow falls it makes no noise whatsoever. Each snowflake makes its way to the ground without as much as a whisper, yet we make such a noise trying to clear a path in the snow, shovels, gritters, snowblowers, snow ploughs not to mention the joyful noise of children screaming as they hurtle down slopes on sleds. On a quiet afternoon I turned the pages of Charles Simic ‘s book of poems No Land In Sight. I found this a delightful collection and on each page I found a beautiful surprise. I share with you two poems. Enjoy a quiet moment as you imagine and ponder and offer a prayer for quiet and for something so much larger than quiet and harder to find – peace.

Crickets
Blessed are those
For whom time
Doesn’t run,
But drags its feet

Seemingly in no hurry,
Like that sailboat
Way out on the bay
Arrested in its flight,

Two gulls hurrying there
To see what’s up
And closer to home,
Crickets, crickets, crickets.

In The Lockdown
I might have gone stir-crazy,
If not for my memories,
Those lifelong companions
Cooped up with me for months
And eager to console me

With stories of men and women
Who withdraw from the world,
And endured years of solitude
And dark nights of the soul
Thriving in some hole-in-the-wall

Where they found lasting peace
Obeying a voice in their heads
Telling them to just sit quietly,
So that the quiet can teach them
Everything they ought to know.     Charles Simic

Prayer:
O God of words and God of silence,
I pause to pray amidst the noise of my
inner self along with the noise around me and the noise of the world.
Help me, I pray, to find silence and to discover silence not as an empty
place, but rather as one full of wonder and possibility.
May your “still small voice” echo not only through the pages
of scripture but through my pulse and my being.
In this silent space may I say within my self the words of
14th century Julian of Norwich – “And all shall be well,
and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well.”
You call us O Lord, to be followers,
not to be absent from the world but to be present in the world.
In this Advent season amidst all the noise help me to find silence and
from this place of silence to be present
to the world’s needs and possibilities. Amen.