I offer you this quote from a poem "Made from Bone" by Mark Nepo, from his little book of poems called Reduced to Joy:
When I can be the truth,
it grows more and more clear
when it is necessary to tell the truth.
That is, when I have access to the place
within me that is lighted, I don't have
to speak heatedly.
I can just give away
warmth. When I am still enough to brush
quietly with eternity, I don't have to
speak of God. I can just offer peace
to those around me.
Since I read those words two mornings ago, I have felt them echo and
resonate inside me like an echo in a deep well. I have read them many times. I aspire to "giving away warmth" and to "offering peace" to those around me. The fact that I am aspiring to these things means I am not doing them, at least not suffuciently,
at the present time, however much I would like to.
These words also highlight for me the slow rising, like yeast in dough, of the pull towards a contemplative receptivity
that is arising in so many people of different religious practices, and in some who would say they have no religious practice. I feel its pull, in myself and many others whom I know, much like a tide, a current that was once out but is now coming in. Once
I was aware of it mostly in early morning and in a pull towards a contemplative meditation practice once or twice a day. Now it leaks out of those boundaries and I catch glimpses of the world within the world, or the person within the person...just glimpses,
but enough to shake me loose of fixed ideas of how things are and especially how things should be. "When I have access..."