Reticence

Words feel so flimsy these days. A quiet before a vast storm has settled into my body, a griefrage percolating far beneath the crust of my busy days. The pressure is building, bubbling and boiling in growing incidents of personal and geopolitical violence. I sense the collective body moaning a haunting rhythm of urgency. Surely, someone or something can stop this.

For better or worse, I’m rarely lost for something to say. But today, I am.

And yet we must make shapes of our lives, must find ways to embody the integrity of what we love. So today, I invite you to encounter the shape of silence that settles into your body in a time like this.

The way it feels to stop for a moment and listen when you see the map of the three million acres of wilderness for sale. The ringing silence after a bomb drops on a hospital or a school. The unanswered calls on the soon-defunct suicide hotline, the stillness of the void at the center of every hungry ghost driving each next unfathomable violation of the sacred.

We are here. Here we are. Whatever good awaits in the not-yet-born, it will be birthed from the silence on the other side of this civilizations’ self-cannibalization.

Prayers to the innocent. Prayers to the wild. Prayers, together, in the quiet of our short and vital lives.

May our witnessing open our hearts.