It’s too loud. The cacophony has risen to such a level that I struggle to hear. There’s just too much. Of everything. Snow falls, unwelcome on this last day of February, but with it comes a whisper. And a beckoning. I step outside with the Yorkie and, as white feathers fall around me, a blanket of
I am haunted now as I never was before by the sense that we all of us have the mark of God’s thumb upon us. We have the image of God within us. We have a holy place within us that gets messed up in a million ways. But it’s there, and more and more
The speed and pace of our life here in this country, the noise and the demand of it, the sheer unadulterated motion of it, are almost too much for me to cope with. Robert Benson, Between the Dreaming and the Coming True: The Road Home to God Sometimes, it’s too much. ”I’m just going to
But your solitude will be a support and a home for you, even in the midst of very unfamiliar circumstances, and from it you will find all your paths. Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet We decide to take advantage of another warm and sunny afternoon to clean out the front flowerbed. I take
We live in an age when skim reading seems to be the new normal, and so we’re in constant danger of skimming ourselves to death. Certainly some books ought to be skimmed. . . But if we aren’t careful, our ability to do deep reading will become a constant and losing struggle. Karen Swallow Prior Dark
Solitude is the furnace of transformation. Without solitude we remain victims of our society and continue to be entangled in the illusions of the false self. Henri Nouwen, The Way of the Heart Suddenly the world seems to assault with its noise and I realize it is deafening me. So I turn it off. And I
It has always taken me a long time to think of something to say, and then more often than not I say it to myself. Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow Sometimes it feels too loud and busy, even when it doesn’t appear that way. That’s a sign that it’s time for intentional solitude and silence, those