To learn to meditate, you have to learn to be silent, and not to be afraid of silence. [. . . .]
[W]e don’t have to create silence. The silence is there, within you. What we have to do is to enter into it, to become silent, to become the silence. The challenge of meditation is to allow ourselves to become silent enough to allow this interior silence to emerge. Silence is the language of the spirit. The language of the spirit is love. And the purpose of meditation is to be in the presence of love, the love that, as Jesus tells us, casts out all fear.
After meditation: “When We Look” by Annie Lighthart in PAX (Newberg, OR: Fernwood, 2021), p. 15.
When We Look
When we look long at one another,
we soften, we relent, listen,
might forgive. We allow for silence
–and when we see each other,
are known, and in that moment
might change
though nothing has moved
or been spoken.
There are some who say
the walls cannot be broken,
but suddenly we are in a free place,
and the fields
that extend from its center
stretch for miles
as if out of the pupil and the iris
of that momentary kingdom.
Image Bonnevaux November 2021
