Learning how to be still, to really be still, and let life happen – that stillness becomes a radiance . –Morgan Freeman
Mothers must guard their own solitude. It’s a radical act. It’s the kind of behavior shift that might seem like shallow self-help, but can actually be a profound breaking of a generational curse by which women automatically subsume their own needs and desires and end up sad or sick or bitter. Or dead. There’s that too. Not to put too fine a point on it, but women throughout history have traded their very lives for the idea that there is nothing more important than nurturing others. In some ways, I believe that. In other ways, I know that idea, unexamined, threatens my sanity and health. — Courtney Martin on a mother’s solitude
The teacher comes when you are ready. But you have to be quiet. —unknown
Solitude forces us to get in touch with our "true selves". In solitude I get rid of my scaffolding: no friends to talk with, no telephone calls to make, no meetings to attend, no music to entertain, just me - naked, vulnerable, weak, sinful, deprived, broken - nothing. It is this nothingness that I have to face in my solitude, a nothingness so dreadful that everything in me wants to run to my friends, my work, my distractions so that I can forget about my nothingness. The wisdom of solitude is that the confrontation with our own frightening nothingness forces us to surrender ourselves totally and unconditionally ….. —From Henri Nouwen's The Way of the Heart
The ego self [and constant competing noise] is like a very large man standing in front of me at a sporting event or concert; I can’t see or hear .
The soul does not use words. It surrounds words with space, and that is what I mean by silence. Silence is a kind of wholeness. It can absorb contraries, paradoxes, and contradictions. Maybe that is why we do not like silence. There is nothing to argue about in true inner silence, and the mind likes to argue. It gives us something to do. The ego loves something it can take sides on. Yet true interior silence does not allow you to take sides. That is one reason contemplation is so liberating and calming. There are no sides to take and only a wholeness to rest in—which frees us to act on behalf of love. — Richard Rohr
Silence is the stillness of Presence – not simply our presence but the transcendent ground of all presence. It isn’t, therefore, something to achieve. Silence is our constant ignored companion. It never goes away. It is us who go away from it because it reminds us of the neglected inner garden that is our soul. Robert Sardello points out that our tendency to think of silence as the absence of sound makes silence into emptiness – a kind of nothingness. But silence isn’t the absence of anything. Silence is prior to sound, not the lack of sound. It is the sound of existence; it is the music of pure being. And when we drop into silence we move into deeper contact with both the beauty of our own being and of Being itself. — David Benner
Pico Ayer; author and speaker (see TED talks) on Stillness. 5 things we can do when we say:
“I don’t have time for stillness or contemplation in my daily life”:
1. Go on long walk on sundays; be in a long open meadow;
2. Put ‘gone away’ note on emails on weekends, turning away from our devices;
3. Spend 20 minutes every morning , 3%, of waking day without device; 3% can transform the other 97%;
4. Restore time: when waiting for someone, or something… don’t fritter time with turning to screen time; turn off lights and listen to music while waiting for someone to be ready or to go somewhere;
5. Never spend more that 5 minutes a day on news; ideally 2 mins; rest of it for people. Gives us hope and possibility of helping neighbors, etc.; everyday we have a choice: will I spend time with what wakes me up, than with what cuts me up?
Sitting still is a way of falling in love with the world and everything in it. –-Pico Ayer
There is an arc of time outside of time, that always exists, but rarely heeded. When on its quiet invitation to stillness, and no other compulsive competing preoccupation, there is a different rhythm of walking, thinking clear thoughts. There is arrival of Alone. The impulses and awakenings of a wholly different kind are allowed in, the previously uninvited are invited, the previously unattended are attended, the previously unimagined, are imagined. – PRH; Nov. 2017
“In the act of silence you’re not waiting for God to make a move. You’re becoming aware of the moves he is making.” – Brennan Manning
There must be a time of day when the man who
makes plans forgets his plans,
and acts as if he had no plans at all.
There must be a time of day when the man who has
to speak falls very silent.
And his mind forms no more propositions,
and he asks himself: Did they have a meaning?
There must be a time
when the man of prayer goes to pray
as if it were the first time in his life
he had ever prayed,
when the man of resolutions puts his
resolutions aside
as if they had all been broken,
and he learns a different wisdom:
distinguishing the sun from the moon,
the stars from the darkness, the sea from the dry land,
and the night sky from the shoulder of a hill. —Thomas Merton
It is an absence that is: a moving away from identifying with turbulent ever-changing thoughts and obsessions and emotions. We cultivate the absence of them; and rather cultivate the voluminous summit of presence and awareness. It is a pathless path of still prayer. — Still prayer, by Martin Laird, a sunlit absence
All donations go directly to Pat & Sarah’s work of welcoming presence, spiritual friendship, pastoral care, and stewardship of land;
Also donations support Pat’s writings. (suggested: $20-$40/mo)
Subscribe to receive weekly writing posts at the bottom of any website page
To donate, go to ‘support’ page here:
