Tag Archives: Stillness

232. Adopt the pace of nature:  her secret is patience.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

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How good it is to center down!  To sit quietly and see one’s self pass by!  The streets of our mind seethe with endless traffic; our spirits resound with clashings, with noisy silences, while something deep within hungers and thirsts for the still moment and the resting lull.  We look at ourselves in this waiting moment–the kinds of people we are.  The questions persist; what are we doing with our lives? What is the end of our doings?  Where is my treasure?  As we listen, floating up through all the jangling echoes of our turbulence, there is a sound of another kind–a deeper note which only the stillness of the heart makes clear.  It moves directly to the core of our being.  Our questions are answered, our spirits are refreshed, and we move back into the traffic of our daily rounds with the peace of the Eternal in our step.  How good it is to center down!  ~Excerpt from For the Inward Journey by Howard Thurman, American author, philosopher, theologian, educator

Happy is the one who listens to me, watching daily at my gates, waiting beside my doors.  ~Proverbs 8:34  ✝

222. Green thoughts emerge from some deep source of stillness which the very fact of winter has released. ~Michael Osler

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I danced in the morning when the world was begun
I danced in the moon and the stars and the sun;
I was called from the darkness by the song of the earth,
I joined in the singing and she gave me birth.

Dance, then, wherever you may be!
I am the Lord of the Dance, said he,
And I’ll lead you on, wherever you may be,
I will lead you all in the Dance, said he!

The moon in her phases and the tides of the sea,
the movement of the Earth, and the seasons that will be
Are rhythm for the dancing and a promise through the years–
The Dance goes on through joy and tears.
~Excerpts from the Lord of the Dance, traditional

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**Photo taken by Natalie on a foggy morning when a blue norther blew in to announce winter’s arrival

The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.  ~Mark 1:1  ✝

212. It is part of the cure to want to be cured. ~Seneca

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To feel keenly the poetry of a morning’s roses,
one has to just have escaped from the claws
of this vulture which we call sickness of body or heart.
~Adapted excerpt from Henri Frederic Amiel

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In order to mend and bridge chasms of painful, isolating realities, I often douse the fires of what breaks my heart in cups of tea or tears that flow during quiet dawns or at night when the wee hours find me awake and alone.  After the sipping or crying comes to an end, a numbed stillness often develops.  When it does, I become aware in its clarity of the amazing nearness of God.  Jesus, whom I’ve been calling, is offering to guide me through portals to places where pools of mercy await.  Sometimes the healing waters lie deep within my own being where the Holy Spirit resides in His cloistered sanctuary.  At other times they are found in the beautiful colors of autumn, or in the glistening dew on greening grass and flowers in springtime, or in the gentle gestures of another’s compassion, or in softly spoken prayers proffered by kind and endearing voices.  Wherever the pool and whoever the beneficial bearer of blessing, one or both sustain me, if I yield, in the returning rhythm of fitness as the Lord’s grace works to render me wholly well.

I’ve discovered that tears have amazing restorative powers for frequently it is when my eyes are blurred with wetness from them that a sense of God’s presence is strongest.  For surely in the loss of His own son by the hands of creatures He breathed life into, He shed more tears than we’ll ever know.  We all endure difficult and sorrowful moments in our lives.  So excruciating is the pain on occasion that it nearly stifles our very breath, but one breath and one step at a time begins the journey out of the depths of despair.

“But I will restore your health and heal your wounds,” declares the Lord…  ~Jeremiah 30:17a  ✝

**Whittard’s is a tea, coffee, and cocoa shop that we found in London last summer.

9. O Autumn…pass not, but sit…and tune thy jolly voice…and all the daughters of the year shall dance! ~William Blake

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In the garden, Autumn is, indeed the crowning glory of the year,
bringing us the fruition of months of thought, and care, and toil.
~Rose G. Kingsley, British Gardener and Writer

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Now that the year has grown long in the tooth, the migratory birds have moved on to warmer lands.  But the birds who overwinter here are still very visible and busy.  However, on the chillier days they, like me, “remain perched” early in the morning and later when the sun is well over the rooftops.  Nevertheless, in spite of our periodic and combined lethargy, we still manage to be out and working during the warmer parts of the day.  The “common feast for all” the garden spreads may be nearly gone and the bird’s tired wings along with my tired feet may drag somewhat, but autumn’s remaining golden glory continues to quicken our spirits.  In fact even after winter ravages the land, we, man and beast alike, who live close to the soil will venture out on the occasional warm day to search with hungry eyes for any signs of what we know lies waiting to emerge from beneath the surface of things.

Autumn’s song is indeed “a rich and lusty melody.”  It induces a healthy renewal in bodies wilted by summer’s long siege of torrid heat, and it creates a restful peacefulness that washes away the “fret and fever of life.”  “It’s jolly voice” sings a comforting song of promise that speaks of God’s circadian rhythms of life–the rhythm of changing seasons, busyness followed by stillness, “youth’s energy followed by age’s measured pace.”

There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens. . .  ~Ecclesiastes 3:1   ✝

7. Meditation and water are wedded forever. ~Herman Melville

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Water, the Hub of Life.
Water is its mater and matrix, mother and medium.
Water is the most extraordinary substance!
Practically all its properties are anomalous,
which enabled life to use it as building material for its machinery.
Life is water dancing to the tune of solids.
~Albert Szent-Gyorgyi

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Seldom do I see a body of water that it doesn’t seduce me with its wiles into a meditative reverie.  In that quiet stillness I feel drawn to peer down into its mysterious depths until imagined or perhaps real images of earth’s origins come alive.  Water seems to possess in all its forms and properties extraordinary qualities so otherworldly that the phenomena of water reaches down and touches pools in “the temple of the inner being.”  While looking into its depths an unmistakable awareness of the Divine’s presence surfaces and holiness rises like a mist.  Gauzy reflections in water quiver and quake as if they possess a life of their own.

Although I know not where it rests in the human psyche, I believe somewhere therein mortals remember their watery beginning and recognize familiar things not of this world, things they know without tutelage or reason.  In the same way a child instinctively recognizes its biological mother after the umbilical cord is severed, I believe we, who are separated here from the Source of our being, retain a sense of His parenting presence because we are of the Lord and inextricably a part of Him.