Sitting in a Quaker meeting yesterday, immersed in silence and stillness with others, these words came to me:

“There is nothing that does not come from silence, that is to say there is nothing that is not of God. There is nothing that is not the creation of stillness and silence and to this silence and to this stillness, all things return. Even forgetting that you and all that can be known is born of silence and presence has it’s ancestry in deep, unshakable, vast and infinite silence. Knowing this, you need not seek a life of only silence but need only turn now to see that this moment and all it contains is already inseparable from the silence and stillness you seek.

In this consistent  recognition, all effects of forgetting this are healed and resolved and the freedom you are may dance.”

After the meeting I reflected on these words. What struck me most strongly was the phrase ‘all effects of forgetting this…’ It seems to me that all personal suffering and indeed suffering we may endure at the hands of others, is born in our forgetting of the vast, infinite well of silence that is our home.

In my life, whenever I notice this endless silence (and it can be noticed now, underlying and allowing for all noise, disturbance, movement etc) I find that whatever has been causing unease dissolves in the recognition of this ever present space of stillness and silence.

Again and again I find there is nothing it cannot hold.