August 17, 2021
Letting Silence Speak
By Amba Gale
I have just returned to the mainland from Isle Royale National Park, where, with Practice, you can tune into the Silence. Nature does that for me, if I approach Nature as my Teacher and my guide, with an appropriate reverence, humility, and longing.
Though “letting silence speak” may sound like an oxymoron, it is not. And though you may think I can describe what Silence speaking sounds like, I cannot. Not really. Not if you want a direct experience. A direct experience, which is after all what matters, is beyond understanding, and a description is the language of understanding.
It lives underneath the beating of your heart. It lives in the moment between your inbreath and your outbreath, if you pay attention. It lives in the moment of observing something outside yourself with reverence and attention, like the fog that floated in and out of our back dock one afternoon I followed with my awareness moment by moment by endless moment.
Through Silence, we find our purpose in life. Through Silence, we find our Way. Purpose lives in that “Silence between notes,” as Dawna Markova says, in her book, I will Not Die an Unlived Life. In that same paragraph, she also says “Your job and mine is…to be in conversation with what is hidden in us in such a way that we can explore what brings us more fully alive.”
To access it, we need to slow W-A-Y down, to dive deep below the busy-ness of our lives and the preoccupations of our mind, to come to a full Stop, to go inside where, like at Happy Isles, in Yosemite, the roar of the river, tumbling over large boulders suddenly becomes the only sound in all of the universe, or where your baby’s laughter and you connect heart to heart and you become one. Silence lives in present moment awareness.
We heartily invite you to join us for a free, two hour, introduction and preview course, “5 Critical Keys: An Introduction to Crossing Thresholds,” in behalf of coming to a stop and heightening your own aliveness, August 26 at 6:30PM Pacific Daylight Time. There you will have the opportunity to tap into your own wisdom for navigating through your next opening, through music, poetry, stories, teaching, exercises and dialogue, as well as get a deep sense of our Fall “Crossing Thresholds” course offering.
Letting Silence Speak
By Amba Gale
Underneath
the preoccupations of the world
and of my mind,
Silence Speaks.
I need but listen:
“Let the fog engulf you,
make a cocoon around you today
as you read or write or cook or wash.
Do not let
the pulls of your mind
with its tentacles of glue
pull you into stories
of past, of present, of future.
Let the fog lift, as it does,
revealing those silent islands
in the mist of time
in the midst of space.
Let the sun shine through,
bless you, and let
you know you are on holy ground.”
