The Gifts of Silence and Solitude

 

 While camped alone on Skinny Fish Lake this past weekend, I had a lot of time to listen to the silence - to the breeze, the bird calls, the creaking of the trees, and to my own heart. I realized then that ultimately, there is only one true reality in life: the love affair that occurs between the masculine Great Beyond and the feminine Web of Life. Then, of course, there is me, and I am simply the swinging door that opens back and forth onto these Two, bringing them together into greater and greater union. In fact, I am simply the way in which the Divine - in both of Its aspects - knows and celebrates Itself within a human mind and heart. Even other people, I realized this past weekend, are simply the Divine in hiding - God, we might say, learning through human trial and error, momentarily forgetting who he is as he loses himself in the challenges of life, yet waking up whenever we experience an epiphany. Ultimately, I realized, all things melt into divine bliss - into that deep, deep sense of contentment that is so vividly present in the silence. And it is the natural world, I've discovered, that puts me in touch with that Silence like nothing else can.

Photo: The view from my backpacker's campsite, just recently emerged from the snow; Skinny Fish Lake, Flattops Wilderness, CO; June 13, 2014