Light and Silence

2 December 2020

 

Gorgeous day today.  Sunlight pouring down and not a cloud to be seen.  Enough of a breeze the keep the air clean as it blows from west to east.  The fires that mottled the color of the sky this summer have subsided and are having no impact on the beauty of this day.  Sunlight, warm sunlight makes this early December day quite tolerable.

 

I picked up one of Thomas Merton’s books today.  It is called No Man is an Island.  Have had this trade paperback copy for at least 35 years.  The pages that were read at my wedding are underlined and still have Post-it notes marking the relevant sections.  

 

As I flipped through the volume looking for something to inspire my day, I came to a passage that talked about the noise we make on a day-to-day basis. Merton believed too much noise, noise like our society’s endless commentary on things and our personally propounded propositions injected into the common discourse, take the edge off our experience of reality. He believed that the constant noise level civilization imposes on our lives blurs the truths of life. Merton says, “There must be a time of day when the man who speak falls very silent.  And his mind forms no more propositions, and he asks himself: did they have a meaning?”

 

A sunny day walk with no headphones on, and no direction or path in mind as one sets out can bring a soul to that empty place where all that exists is the reality of nature. The natural world is one of the Divine’s most beautiful gift to humanity. A walk can center us in nature. Like walking a labyrinth, when we ramble without direction, we can set aside the hurts, the desires and the to do lists that clutter our mind.  We can get empty.  When we get empty of the noise, we get open to the possibilities and the realities of our lives.