Renée, I am struck by your experience of Entering the Silence, one that seems to have been conceived through the winter thunderstorm. In the winter of 2016 I had a very similar experience. Sleepless with dizziness and desperate to experience stillness, I lay in bed while a wild storm of rain and wind thrashed the bedroom windows. After what felt like hours of listening and praying, suddenly my perception lifted into the blue sky above the storm. And with that, the stillness penetrated my being, not as an erasure of the dizziness or the storm, but a stillness that could co-exist and pre-exist all the chaos. This moment changed everything for me. Everything. x
Kimberly, thank you for sharing this experience with me. There is such grace here, you being ushered into the stillness that is eternal. What a blessing to receive this moment. It seems the significance of this eternal stillness could only be registered in the midst of such chaos, that your dizziness had to be taken through the storm for you to be lifted from it, not, as you say, the erasure of the dizziness, but a stillness that is behind and beyond it.
Reading this I could feel the Silence moving around and through you, asking you to carry it with you. Thank you for calling us to move deeper within, to access the most important thing. I found this to be a very moving essay. Your words allowed me a slow read where I could sink into the space between the words to get a sense of the Silence.
Donna, thank you for sharing your experience of reading these words, and how they slowed you into the Silence between them . . . carrying the Silence with you. Thank you for going slowly. Your words touch me, and mine are slow to come to the page in response, as if we two are in the Silence between the words between us.
Renee, your writing today moved something ancient in me. The way you speak of Silence as Presence, as origin, as the numinous ground behind and between all things, entered me as felt recognition. It woke me up to a deeper meaning of an early life experience.
When I was seven months old, I sustained a head injury that cracked my skull like an eggshell. In that moment, I encountered two forces I had no language for then: the vivid red pulse of life and the vast black of void. I’ve spent a lifetime navigating the fragmentation that followed without fully understanding that what I met in that early moment was not only trauma, but a first contact with this Holy Silence you name so beautifully.
Your description of stepping onto the tundra north of the Brooks Range opened me even more. Alaska, where I was born, is a land I know intimately, its midnight sun, it's vast stretches of tundra, its long dark, the aurora, the deep cold, the snow-covered peaks that stretch beyond what the eyes can hold. It’s a place where origin feels startlingly close, and yet it’s a place I had to run from after high school (only in the last 5 years living there part time again), because of that very intensity. Reading your experience there felt like meeting a shared homeland of the soul where primordial trust could reassert itself in me.
Your words helped me glimpse a deeper truth: that life’s fragmentation is part of the human condition, and that the blackness, what once felt like erasure, is the benevolent void, the ever-present origin that has been with me all along.
Thank you for giving voice to something I have been sensing but could not name. Your writing is a transmission, and today it opened a door deep within me. With immense gratitude as we enter into our season of thanks-giving ......
Toni, what you share is deeply moving. Words fail me here, but there is a sense in the connection you make between the cracked skull you sustained as an infant and the intensity of forces in Alaska, that these two are too providential to deny as an interpenetrating pair . . . to usher you into Silence as a presence before you even had words. A moment of grace, originary Presence coming to meet you in a time of terrifying trauma. You would carry this Presence within you. . . .
There is something profoundly Edenic about Alaska. Reading you here gives me, too, a sense of "shared homeland of the soul."
May we all come to this recognition:
"life’s fragmentation is part of the human condition, and that the blackness, what once felt like erasure, is the benevolent void, the ever-present origin that has been with me all along."
Nature has always been my greatest source. I know that silence of nothing that penetrates the soul - in the desert, where I could hear an insect crawling, it was so silent. My ears went insane with the nothingness of it all, and within that, I felt peace.
Tina, I echo you about penetrating the soul, and it makes sense that Nature has always been your place of encounter with the Silence. The desert is a place of such exquisite mystique. Sardello tells us, “There is an affinity between the natural world and Silence. Silence envelops nature and gathers nature to her as a blessed place of intensity.”
Renée, I am struck by your experience of Entering the Silence, one that seems to have been conceived through the winter thunderstorm. In the winter of 2016 I had a very similar experience. Sleepless with dizziness and desperate to experience stillness, I lay in bed while a wild storm of rain and wind thrashed the bedroom windows. After what felt like hours of listening and praying, suddenly my perception lifted into the blue sky above the storm. And with that, the stillness penetrated my being, not as an erasure of the dizziness or the storm, but a stillness that could co-exist and pre-exist all the chaos. This moment changed everything for me. Everything. x
Kimberly, thank you for sharing this experience with me. There is such grace here, you being ushered into the stillness that is eternal. What a blessing to receive this moment. It seems the significance of this eternal stillness could only be registered in the midst of such chaos, that your dizziness had to be taken through the storm for you to be lifted from it, not, as you say, the erasure of the dizziness, but a stillness that is behind and beyond it.
Beauty.
❤️
Reading this I could feel the Silence moving around and through you, asking you to carry it with you. Thank you for calling us to move deeper within, to access the most important thing. I found this to be a very moving essay. Your words allowed me a slow read where I could sink into the space between the words to get a sense of the Silence.
Beautiful❤️
Donna, thank you for sharing your experience of reading these words, and how they slowed you into the Silence between them . . . carrying the Silence with you. Thank you for going slowly. Your words touch me, and mine are slow to come to the page in response, as if we two are in the Silence between the words between us.
With love and thanksgiving. ❤️
Yes! We two are in the Silence together.
Wishing you and your family a Happy Thanksgiving!
Thank you, Donna.
As always, thanks Renee. Through you, I stand in my mind on the shore of the Arctic Ocean.
Michael, Thank you. It is good to “see” you here “on the shore of the Arctic Ocean.”
Renee, your writing today moved something ancient in me. The way you speak of Silence as Presence, as origin, as the numinous ground behind and between all things, entered me as felt recognition. It woke me up to a deeper meaning of an early life experience.
When I was seven months old, I sustained a head injury that cracked my skull like an eggshell. In that moment, I encountered two forces I had no language for then: the vivid red pulse of life and the vast black of void. I’ve spent a lifetime navigating the fragmentation that followed without fully understanding that what I met in that early moment was not only trauma, but a first contact with this Holy Silence you name so beautifully.
Your description of stepping onto the tundra north of the Brooks Range opened me even more. Alaska, where I was born, is a land I know intimately, its midnight sun, it's vast stretches of tundra, its long dark, the aurora, the deep cold, the snow-covered peaks that stretch beyond what the eyes can hold. It’s a place where origin feels startlingly close, and yet it’s a place I had to run from after high school (only in the last 5 years living there part time again), because of that very intensity. Reading your experience there felt like meeting a shared homeland of the soul where primordial trust could reassert itself in me.
Your words helped me glimpse a deeper truth: that life’s fragmentation is part of the human condition, and that the blackness, what once felt like erasure, is the benevolent void, the ever-present origin that has been with me all along.
Thank you for giving voice to something I have been sensing but could not name. Your writing is a transmission, and today it opened a door deep within me. With immense gratitude as we enter into our season of thanks-giving ......
Toni, what you share is deeply moving. Words fail me here, but there is a sense in the connection you make between the cracked skull you sustained as an infant and the intensity of forces in Alaska, that these two are too providential to deny as an interpenetrating pair . . . to usher you into Silence as a presence before you even had words. A moment of grace, originary Presence coming to meet you in a time of terrifying trauma. You would carry this Presence within you. . . .
There is something profoundly Edenic about Alaska. Reading you here gives me, too, a sense of "shared homeland of the soul."
May we all come to this recognition:
"life’s fragmentation is part of the human condition, and that the blackness, what once felt like erasure, is the benevolent void, the ever-present origin that has been with me all along."
Heartfelt gratitude.
Nature has always been my greatest source. I know that silence of nothing that penetrates the soul - in the desert, where I could hear an insect crawling, it was so silent. My ears went insane with the nothingness of it all, and within that, I felt peace.
Tina, I echo you about penetrating the soul, and it makes sense that Nature has always been your place of encounter with the Silence. The desert is a place of such exquisite mystique. Sardello tells us, “There is an affinity between the natural world and Silence. Silence envelops nature and gathers nature to her as a blessed place of intensity.”
In gratitude.
Ah...a blessed place of intensity. YES!
A felt sense!
Thanks for this beautiful essay, Renee. And for the reminder of your reading circle. It sounds like the perfect thing for winter — to go inside.
Julie, thank you. And in echo, may we enter the Silence as the trees and bees and all of life in its winter retreat of energies.