Some Time to Collect Myself

A poem about the role of silence in sanctification
June 3, 2005





I took some time to collect myself into myself.

I took the time to eat a meal of silence,
Carefully prepared for me...
each ingredient silence, lack...
I partook of a full banquet of stillness and nothingness.

In the void, in nothingness,
I came to be.

I came to be more,
I came to be more myself,
In the silence,
more solid,
more permanent,
more internally connected.

I am tired now.
I'm full.
I must stop ceasing,
I must go work, I must rest from resting,
must scatter myself around
to various tasks and speeches,

In hopes that soon I will be hungry again, hungry enough to eat from an empty plate again, or to listen to the impossibly faint suggestions of harmony, the far off promise of beautiful noise, noise which is too massive, too real for me to hear; I… am too scattered.

I am now too tired to return and sit in the void in which I come to be,
Too tired to meet the incredible challenge of sitting still,
The monumental achievement that is... not doing anything…

Perhaps in the evening again I'll have the strength to be alone, quiet,
To be with myself and another in the formless void, darkness over the surface of the deep; I can feel the spirit moving.

I can’t hear but whispers… whispers… I can tell I'm being made.

Since I was starving, I sat awhile.
I sat while parts of me returned to me, coalescing while I waited.
It burned like a hug from a flaming eagle, but
it took me up a notch, thank God (and the saints)
and I am more myself.


Glory to God alone.