January - The Silence of Being

After viewing an episode of Through the Wormhole during a group gathering recently, one participant spoke of trying to take in the reality of the vastness of time we were hearing about. He recalled how we used to think 2,000 years was unimaginably long. Now we think in terms of billions of years! He asked, What do we do with that new awareness? How do we wrap our minds around the fact that the Universe is about 14 billion years old?

His comments and amazement reminded me of cosmologist Brian Swimme when he speaks using those phenomenal numbers. His voice exudes breathless enthusiasm, drawing me into the Great Mystery. I long for his kind of deep awareness and residence in the Presence. In an interview with Charles Eisenstein, Brian spoke of the fact that just one hundred years ago we thought there was only one galaxy, and now scientists think there are two trillion galaxies, each with billions of stars! He commented that is impossible to take this in cognitively; rather, he said it is an invitation to dwell in a beauty way. Beauty above us, below, and all around us. Then he indicated that an appropriate response to the magnificence of what we have learned is deeper than mind; it is to sink into the silence of being. What an invitation for the year 2022, sinking more deeply into the silence of being and traveling the beauty way.

Brother David Steindl-Rast offers a similar invitation in his poem May You Grow Still Enough. Here are my favorite lines, and they are my prayer for you in 2022.

May you grow still enough

to hear the splintering of starlight in the winter sky

and the roar at earth's fiery core.

May you grow still enough

to hear the stir of a single snowflake in the air,

so your inner silence may turn into hushed expectation.

Photo by Greg Rakozy on Unsplash. Thank you.