This title is easier to write than practice! I try to get away for times of silence, and this is where I am as I write. It is a century old farmhouse (remodeled for retreats), and outside it is winter at it fiercest. March 15, -21 Celsuis. The wind is fiercely blowing, trying to gain access through the windows and doors and the air is filled with sharp whines and whistles as it permeates and invades the inside warmth. Snow crystals driven like machine gun fire pellets mercilessly pound the perimeter of the house. Relentless winds make snow swirls outside dance like miniature tornadoes and I wonder why, when we should be enjoying the beginnings of spring, we are hurled back into winter’s frozen embrace. It is time for solitude, amidst the havoc outside. It is difficult to find a quiet place physically – quite another to still the noise constantly coming from within. In keeping with my search for solitude and silence I found this in one of the books here, and thought to share, given our renewed (never ending?) season of Winter:
A Winter Wonderland Psalm
The ancient psalmist plucked his strings and sang a sentence sprung from you/ “Be still, my soul, like a winter landscape which is wrapped in the white prayer shawl of silent snow fringed with icy threads./ Sit still, O my body, like an icy pond frozen at attention, at rest yet alert.// Be still, my frantic mind, from your whirling like a perpetual gyroscope, constantly restless, ever on the move./ Endlessly you rove on a nomadic quest roaming the roads of my Egoland, visiting its likes and dislikes, a Disneyland of distorted discrimination./ Ceaselessly you visit its sacred shrines of self-righteous forts of fears.// Be still, my being, so that like Lewis Carroll’s Alice, you may, with grace, find the tiny, hidden doorway that leads to Wonderland./ Be still so that you can discover slowly, day by day, that God and you are one, to know in that Wonder-of-Wonderlands who you really are. (from Psalms of Solidarity, Edward Hays).