Oftentimes when I'm out in Nature, thoughts about the various aspects of my life emerge full-force. Conflicts I'm having with the people I know, career difficulties, as well as my joys and dreams for the future all surface and begin chattering. At first this can seem disconcerting. After all, the reason I've taken the hike is precisely to move outside myself and to dissolve in the immense beauty of the landscape. However, my perspective becomes more enlightened when I realize that all of those thoughts are only able to occur at all because they are being mirrored back to me by the Divine Presence inhabiting the vast Silence of the landscape. As Swiss philosopher Max Picard says, "Monologue is in fact a DIALOGUE with silence."
In another passage, Picard employs a playful image, comparing human words to a ball that children are bouncing repeatedly against a wall. The wall, in this metaphor, is precisely the reality of Silence. Here, sacred Silence serves as a sort of mirror that reflects back to us our own thoughts, filled now with the healing power and love that perpetually inhabit that Silence. The only thing to be done during these times is to allow ourselves - together with our thoughts - to be surrounded and embraced by the immensity of the Silence. As Sigurd Olson says, we begin to have "a sense of being engulfed by something Greater." It is then that we experience the reality of divine intimacy; "hugged," as it were, by the loving presence who dwells within the Silence.
Photos: Agnes Lake Trail and the Nokhu Crags, Never Summer Range, CO, November 7, 2014
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