Now the Silence

Now the Silence

At first it’s a daunting task, sitting in the darkness with nothing between yourself and your thoughts.  Like a pin ball game my brain lights up with random thoughts strung together by my fleeting attention to them.  Soon I am overcome by their power and I retreat once again to the comfort of my distractions.  I feed my fear with information, scholarship, worthwhile pursuits, food, friends, television, pets, exercise, programs, sleep…anything… to keep me awake and distracted from the silence.

But like an appointment made with my doctor I would never miss.  So I keep on showing up for the silence knowing that the Doctor has promised the same.  But I feel like I’m sitting in the waiting room, with no hope of fighting my way through the queue.  So I sit and I wait. I sit with the thoughts that consume me and the worries that define me.  And once again I go home overcome and disappointed with myself and with my inability to reach my goal.

Now the silence has become a friend.  This is a friend that allows me to lay my thoughts down like baggage that is too much for this traveler to carry.  And these days I can’t wait to hear what silence has to say.  My friend you have taught me more about myself than a thousand words or a thousand stories could ever tell.  In the depths of this silence I am lost into something more than myself and I can’t figure out what is I and what is other. 

Then silence retreats and I am I again and I am in the world.  And yet the I who I am sees the other that connects all the other “I”s in the world, and I forget the distractions that kept me from the silence in the first place.  I laugh because I realize that I am not alone in this world and that You are waiting to speak with me through every “other” that I encounter.  You were always here.  It was I who was filled with wanderlust.

Now the silence………….