article by Christina Donnell  
​(see Winds of Change website)

“Silence is the root of everything. If you spiral into its void a hundred voices will thunder messages you long to hear.”
Rumi

All of nature is a series of out-births of the eternal within the great silence. It is a powerful vital energy passing through the whole of creation, governing all things. All things are from it, in it, and by it. Life itself begins no sooner, rises no higher, has no other glory unless the eternal begins it and leads it on. This light hides itself in us and makes itself manifest in us. Deep inside our human interior is that still silence where something eternal, timeless, something that is not measurable by thought, operates in our everyday life.

When the mystery of it opens inside you, you experience the unity that is opening itself in many ways. When it opens, our contracted, narrow sense of an “I” recedes as this expansive and expanding force grows and breaks forth.

Surrender wholly to it, it will abide in you, become the life of your life, and be natural to you. Come; we will be together silent for a while. The music that is in the silence as potential, let it come and astonish you. Rumi is right. It thunders messages the soul longs to hear.
​

Do not be hardened by the pain
and cruelty of this world.
Be strong enough to be gentle,
to be soft and supple like running water,
gracefully bending around sudden turns,
lithely waving in strong winds,
freely flowing over sharp rocks,
all the while quietly sculpting
this hard world into ever deeper beauty,
gently eroding rigid rock into silken sand,
tenderly transforming human cruelty
into human kindness.
Remember, true strength is not found in the stone,
but in the water that shapes the stone.
— L.R. Knost

painting by Christopher Castle