I can't sleep…
Let’s walk around outside
and forget it is raining.
Let’s get soaked in all that noise.
Let’s be water all day,
and breathe like low tide when we sleep,
breathe like dew, and grateful faucets.
Let’s be the ice melting at the top of mountains—
that kind of clear.
~ Sophia Holtz, “Prayer to be Said on the Evening of a Terrible Day”
Credits: Poem Source: The Sensual Starfish. Photograph: Namaste
Perhaps we wouldn’t need chapels if our lives were already clear and calm (a saint or a Jesus may never need to go into a church; he’s always carrying one inside himself). Chapels are emergency rooms for the soul. They are the one place we can reliably go to find who we are and what we should be doing with our own lives—usually by finding all we aren’t, and what is much greater than us, to which we can only give ourselves up.
“I like the silent church,” Emerson wrote, “before the service begins.”
~ Pico Iyer, Where Silence is Sacred
Image: Groteleur