SILENCE AND SOLITUDE

Ahhhh, what a beautiful morning. Cool, crisp, windows open, birds singing, my "bliss station", and beautiful, golden silence.

You know, hospitals just aren't silent. And there's no such thing as solitude. Over the years, I've learned the value of silence and solitude, and I "require" that space in order to function as a human. That still, somewhere in the shadow of my psyche, sounds selfish, but it's not. It's fact. And I am reminded often just how much I require it in order to function well.

My dear precious mother has been recuping from knee replacement in our local hospital. She's had a couple of setbacks, so I was been there with her for 6 days. She's precious and I love her, but there just wasn't any silence or solitude. Her doctor sent her to the rehab floor yesterday afternoon, and I was told, "Go home." This morning, I was was in my "bliss station", listening to golden sounds of silence, and feeling the sweet honey of stillness wash over my soul.

Then I opened my Bible to begin my "Engaging Scripture" study, and there, on a little piece of paper, tucked into oblivion was this little dittie that Andy shared with us one evening as preparation for centering prayer. It was just the "permission" I needed to relax into my silent moment and breathe.

SOLITUDE
(from Breathing Under Water: Spirituality and the 12 Steps

The most simple spiritual discipline is some degree of solitude and silence. But it's the hardest, because none of us want to be with someone we don't love. To be with our own thoughts and feelings, to stop the addictive prayer wheels and just feel what we're really feeling, think what we're really thinking, is probably the most courageous act most of us will ever do.

There's probably no way out of our addictive society--and our addictive, dysfunctional families--apart from some significant and chosen degree of silence and solitude.

I go to agrarian societies, places in Africa or the Philippines, and there I see non-addicted people. I see people who lead quiet, simple lives, under stimulated, with a few basic truths that they hold onto all their life. Think of how many things stimulate us daily: radio, television, billboards, conversations. We've go to slow down the chatter, the stimulation; we've got to feel many feelings which have been pent up and denied for decades. We've become overloaded, which is why we're afraid to do it.

We won't have the courage to go into that terrifying place of the soul without a great love, without the light and love of the Lord. Such silence is the most spacious and empowering technique in the world, yet it's not a technique at all. It's precisely the refusal of all technique.

I encourage you, find yourself a "bliss station" (mine's a certain chair in my living room), and just be still--just for 10 minutes, be still and simply breathe. Make some room in your life for purposed silence and solitude. Listen to the quiet and the sound of your own breath. Make it a daily practice. Get to know yourself, and the Holy.

Namaste.