The way to you lies clearly in my heart

The way to You
lies clearly in my heart
and cannot be seen or known to the mind.
As my words turn to silence,
Your sweetness surrounds me.
-Hakim Sanai




-- from The Book of Everything: Journey of the Heart's Desire, by Hakim Sanai Al-Ghaznavi / Translated by Priya Hemenway

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Monks on Silence and Prayer

I copied the following graphic, paragraph and link from the City Cafe page of the Public Broadcasting Atlanta website. It features a four-minute audio clip that has recently been broadcast on WABE, Atlanta’s public broadcasting radio station. Click on the link beneath the image to hear the audio clip; it features chanting by the monks and an interview with one of the brothers from the Monastery of the Holy Spirit in Conyers, Georgia.

Click here to listen »

Back in 1944 twenty-one Trappist monks left an Abbey in Kentucky to set up a monastery in what was then a very rural Conyers, Georgia. Trappist monks value silence and will generally only speak when necessary. And for decades they’ve worked to uphold their faith and traditions.

Li Po

You ask me why I live on Green Mountain ?
I smile in silence and the quiet mind.
Peach petals blow on mountain streams
To earths and skies beyond Humankind

Praying

It doesn't have to be
the blue iris, it could be
weeds in a vacant lot, or a few
small stones; just
pay attention, then patch

a few words together and don't try
to make them elaborate, this isn't
a contest but the doorway

into thanks, and a silence in which
another voice may speak.

~ Mary Oliver ~
from Thirst: Poems

“Life is a perpetual adjustment and readjustment -
it is an ever-changing movement on the surface -
but in its depths it is perfect calmness, peace and stillness.
Since universal motion is a wave from the infinite silence and repose,
it has the nature of the source from which it has sprung.
So, bliss is the beginning, the middle and the end of all things - be it static or dynamic.”

~Swami Ramdas

I believe that God is in me as the sun is in the colour and fragrance of a flower — the Light in my darkness, the Voice in my silence. — Helen Keller

buy this book: The Story of My Life: The Restored Classic, Complete and Unabridged, Centennial Edition

Leave me here freely all alone
In a cell where never sunlight shone
should no one ever speak to me
This golden silence makes me free. — part of a poem written by a prisoner at Dachau concentration camp

“You need not go to heaven to see God; nor need you speak loud, as if God were far away; nor need you cry for wings like a dove to fly to Him. Only be in silence, and you will come upon God within yourself.”

–Saint Teresa of Avila

If It Could Ascend - by N. Scott Momaday

I behold there
the far, faint motion of leaves.
The leaves shine,
and they will shiver down to death.
Something like a leaf lies here within me;
it wavers almost not at all,
and there is no light to see it by -
that it withers upon a black field.
If it could ascend the thousand years into my mouth,
I would make a word of it at last,
and I would speak it into the silence of the sun.

Buy the book: In The Presence of The Sun: Stories and Poems

08.29.08 - Wilderness

"I live in the woods out of necessity. I get out of bed
in the middle of the night because it is imperative
that I hear that silence of the night, alone, and, with
my face on the floor, say psalms, alone, in the
silence of the night.
...the silence of the forest is my bride and the sweet
dark warmth of the whole world is my love and out
of the heart of that dark warmth comes the secret that
is heard only in silence, but it is the root of all the
secrets that are whispered by all the lovers in their
beds all over the world.
-Thomas Merton, Dancing in the Water of Life, 240.