Silence

Silence has its own way of showing me things that have nothing to do with language, vision, or anything I could directly name. I don’t know how to articulate it. Perhaps it’s one of those things that words simply fall short of being able to describe.

So, with that said, I’ve been thinking about silence a lot today. I went out on my deck and leaned into the space my mother used to call the portal, the space just before the forest begins. Last night after the rain finally ended, the clouds surrounded Sharptop and showed me gradations and spectrums of color I haven’t seen before. The light there is always different. A blessing even in times of grief and fear. But silence and solitude can be so kind here. They can also seem like a desert of sorts, I confess. There’s an emptiness I feel here that is both frightening and beautiful. I don’t think emptiness is the best word for it, but it will have to do. It’s related to silence, I suppose. In the silence here, there are of course forest noises, and occasionally the sound of a car going by on Cove Road up above my property, but there are not the claiming and clamorous voices of students or friends or family. I love those voices most of the time. But here I feel like I’m standing on the edge of something more than just my deck. I think I am still afraid of it. It doesn’t just show up here. It likes to save itself mostly for the woods and swamps. It isn’t trying to disconnect me from community or anyone else in a tangible, literal way. But it does sure enough want something from me. Perhaps by “it” I mean God. I suppose that’s true, since I believe (even when I don’t feel it) that God is in everything, all of us, all the time. I think of Maurice Manning’s beautiful poem from the Bucolics collection, the one where he’s talking to God and says “what I want from you is nothing Boss compared to what you want from me”. That feels very true for me too. It doesn’t feel like a scold, though, even when I haven’t been meditating, praying, reading, or working in the ways I feel like I “should” be. It is much more of a promise. It’s exciting, actually.

I don’t think it will ever be what I think it will be, that “experience” of being claimed and held.

For me silence is as much about seeing as anything else. For me to see in a way that recognizes the ordinary holiness and beauty in absolutely everything, I need silence. I don’t recognize that beauty all of the time, but when I do it seems to permeate everything and everybody. It can be very intense, even tiring. It doesn’t “play favorites” but it isn’t aloof or remote. It holds everyone’s soul to its Heart, this silence. It sees everyone as its favorite. I want to trust it more. I don’t need locutions or dramatic conversations with God, though I hope I would be open to them if God wanted me to be. I want to feel the Heart of silence, which I tend to feel as the Heart of Christ and of Jesus. I am kinder and more patient when I try to put myself in this “space.” Sometimes it comes to me of its own accord, thank God. I am thinking of so many times at the land off of Griffith Road or over by Hidden Pond. Times when I feel a poignancy to the edge of everything, from the sudden appearance of a rabbit at the edge of the path to the sound of a whippoorwhill before it’s gotten dark. There can be a melancholy present, I guess, but I don’t know that I would really name it as such. It’s some sort of alloy. It’s something like what Rilke wrote about in the Tenth Duino Elegy when he wished he could have received and surrendered to his nights of suffering more closely. It’s Lawrence’s three strange angels. It might even be a cousin of Pascal’s FIRE…God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob. It’s what held me in place for unnoticed hours that summer afternoon in Kentucky, overcome with joy and love beside the statue of Jesus and his crimson heart. I think it must be with me all the time. If I can begin---continue?---to be able to recognize it in any given moment, to let it open and share its silent heart with me, I will be---what? Happy? Not that, necessarily….maybe grateful? Actually, “present” is the best word I can find, which is paradoxical because what I’m talking about is really, I think, more about absence than presence---it has often felt that way, anyway. I can sometimes conceive of the absence as a benediction, a presence, even when it feels like emptiness, and that is a huge grace. I can’t think of anything more—or less--I would want to pray for. 

along the way

The early light of this midwinter
weather is finally choosing
its full name.
Poor and transformative,
the humble challenge
of your desert Heart
shares its imagination
with every cloud,
every changing sky,
every hungry traveller
who washes the feet
of Jesus
in the busy city
along the way to becoming
the promised Feast.

----Laura Sorrells
Advent 2015

the secret changes

My pilgrim heart
waits for you
in the middle of
its own unrecognized
silent compass.
Your wordless psalm
lets me pray along
with it, all of us
alive together
here in the secret
changes of faith's
transfiguring night.

©Laura Sorrells 2015
all rights reserved

the rhetoric of silence

The burning cure
of sacramental encounter
is calling me out
of my stillness.
The rhetoric of silence
is teaching me how
to ask, how to
worship. How to
confess the petty
troubles of my
willingness. How,
finally, to remain,
despite the pull
of the world's
safe and stifling
strangeness.

©Laura Sorrells 2014
all rights reserved

another time

The last time I stayed up all night I was so excited about getting up before 3 a.m. to chant psalms at Vigils that I couldn’t sleep. I sat on my bed in my little room in the guest house of the Trappist monastery in Kentucky where I was on retreat and read a little from Kazantzakis’ novel about Saint Francis of Assissi and tried to meditate. Saint Francis has always been a vitally important and iconic figure for me, singularly compelling even before I began this part of my spiritual journey. I remember reading part of the Kazantzakis novel, for instance, back in Athens, Georgia, in the spring of 1996, not long before I left town on what felt like a whim to me at the time. I had been full of fear and despair then, and the book had been inexplicably comforting to me. I think I put it aside pretty fast when I moved in with my mother in the little mountain town where I still live now, some seventeen years later. At any rate, I didn’t sleep at all last month, that first hot July night on retreat at Gethsemani, even though I was exhausted from the long drive. I went into that odd, liminal space where shadows play games with the edges of a person’s eyesight and sounds sing songs that aren’t there. I know I was just really tired, but I felt keenly alive and powerfully happy. Almost giddy with joy, really. The monastery church there has a specific scent, as does the one in Georgia, an aroma that is both earthy and austere, but in a totally different way from the granite and evergreen and moss of Arabia Mountain. Not wild like a landscape but not exactly domesticated, either. I went into the church a little early and sat in the back, where the retreatants sit during the liturgy of the Hours, and just waited for things to begin. It was very dark, very quiet. The silence was broken by almost nothing, only a few small sounds here and there, just the settling of wood, the whisper of small wind against glass, and the breath of the body of everything, dark and kind and unknowable and empty in the absence of song and speech.

a torrent of graces

The solemn cloud
above me
is seeking a canyon
to sanctify. Its thirst
gathers around this
silence. Something like
starlight trembles
in my haunted
psalmist's heart
as a wild, unutterable
torrent of graces
rises into my emptiness.

©Laura Sorrells 2013
all rights reserved

kindled

Listen for the secret name
of God
that the sky prays
in April.
Something wild
and shining follows me
across the dark roof
at night.
My kindled heart
cracks into
lace and marble,
a silent room waiting gladly
for the auspicious weather of Christ
to meet me,
carrying nothing, new-born and
empty as light.

©Laura Sorrells 2012
all rights reserved

I got this found poem mostly from Annie Dillard's beautiful book Tickets for a Prayer Wheel, which I just ran across while looking through some old books of my mother's.

morning prayer

Reverence draws out bliss.

Let the heat of the water on my neck in the morning be an engine for a righteous fire on behalf of my best efforts, my kindest impulses, and my truest hopes.

Let the taste of Greek yogurt and Grape Nuts I share with the dawn chorus remind me of every sweetness possible in the yearnings of sunrise over Sharptop.

Let the conversation I have with the barista who’s overwhelmed with latte orders be one of grounding humor and understanding.

Let the laughter I share with my students before the day begins be a chord of play and a cord of openness between us.

Let the hour I have to myself in the middle of the morning be a space for reclaiming my breath and honoring right livelihood with a little bit of stillness.

Let the ears I hear my students with be fresh and free of any judgment.

Let the air I share with the leaping deer in the meadow off Mineral Springs Road be clean and salvific, the kind of air that tells its own stories and makes them easy to hear, cool with coming October.

Let me understand my role in the sweep of the day with tenderness and fire, with patience and a lover’s soul.

Amen.

This is something I wrote several years ago and tweaked tonight. 

The liturgy this hidden
country breathes
is a dance of living
emptiness. Its smoky desert
heart brings secrets home:
crows flying in peace
with eagles, a
transformation shining
like a bonfire's
dream.
The nearest temple is your own
barefooted truth. The God
you are learning to love
might bring you anything,
now, if you listen, if
you see, if you
let his wild
and claiming silence
begin.

©Laura Sorrells 2012
all rights reserved

Watching the light in
a summer garden, I notice
how a cathedral of unexpected
geometry reflects its
living heart.
Without everything here,
(and elsewhere)
the improvisation of reverence
would be lost.
What other weather
is there?

©Laura Sorrells 2012
some rights reserved


I wrote this found poem using Nicholas Harberd's book Seed to Seed: the Secret Life of Plants.

the air in a garden

All the shy green fire
of your vulnerable knowing
hums like the immaculate
havoc of God
in a field of light
and silence.

The seeds of a restless
delight are
remembering how
to love the world.

Your beginning
is enough,
imperishable and
absolute,
a lion gentled
by the air
in a garden.

--©Laura Sorrells 2012
all rights reserved

shine and crackle

The dark slope of lawn did not catch, did not need to catch the yellow light of the full Easter moon or the orange glow of the pinwheel sparks ascending skyward from the little pyramid of lumber smolder on the grass. Things were already burning when I got there. The peaks of monks' hoods seemed to hold all the secret energy of the world. The candle they lit for me singed my knuckles with its crooked tumble of white wax. I didn't give it room enough above the sphere of paper and it became a truncated stub too soon. Still it flickered beautifully for awhile in the brightness of the church. The heat within moved outwards and I stood with its scorch until I could not any longer, weak in the knees and dizzy with strange light. No one else seemed heatstruck, lightstruck, candlestruck, or stuck in any way. They stood and sang and held their candles easy: calm and fresh, clean, awake, uncluttered or confused. I wanted the wood of a choir stall to cling to, to lean against, but only air was there. A negative space peopled with shine and crackle, ache and arch. My candle died and I did not know what was happening when someone offered me a flame to wake it up. The light above me was very bright and I tasted salt the way you do with nausea but no nausea came. My heart warmed on into my throat and kept me upright. Warmed and cooled simultaneously. Synesthesia at play in the fields of the Lord. Dizzy but strong, I listened to the blue air come alive, watched the psalmody sing itself into the morning, tasted the scent of myrrh in the swing of the censer, dreamt the cold metal sides of the folding chair my fingers clutched was a cradle, an empty tomb, a big stone rolled away from a space no longer needed.

A Lace of Everything

To approach
the landscape of spirit,
choose the bone
of attention’s
treacherous blossom.
Serve the tricky ceremony
of exhalation.
Emerge from the fertile nothing
of winter’s bed
and disperse the season’s
messages—
a lace of everything,
a margin of crows and roses,
sinuous,
sharp,
and inseparable.

--lks 2011