Thursday Thoughts...

“To deliver oneself up, hand oneself over, entrust oneself completely to the silence of a wide landscape of woods and hill, or sea, or desert: to sit still while the sun comes up over the land and fills its silences with light. To pray and work in the morning and to labor in meditation in the evening when night falls upon that land and when the silence fills itself with darkness and with stars. This is a true and special vocation. There are few who are willing to belong completely to such silence, to let it soak into their bones, to breathe nothing but silence, to feed on silence, and to turn the very substance of their life into a living and vigilant silence.” 

Thomas Merton

As B and I walked on Sunday - our platypus walk we call it that loops along the creek and through the Showgrounds and back to the main street to an early morning coffee - we stopped, as is our want, to see if there were any platypus about. We are unbelievably fortunate to live in a place where platypus live, a place where they are readily seen. Not every time we walk, but often enough. They are shy and precious.

They stop us in our tracks. We stop, in silence, we scan the creek, we wait patiently to see if the ripples appear; the air bubbles. We wait. We oftentimes think we could wait a lot longer, and see a lot more, but we are often on a mission so to speak - places to go, people to see.

This quote made me think about what it truly means to stop and be present in nature. To be one with the silence, letting it soak into our bones, to fill our minds, to overflow our thoughts. The simplest, yet hardest, of being.

It is so tempting to follow these words and to see how a life changes if more time is spent with silence.