Ruah Bull - Spiritual Director

  Best of any song is bird song in the quiet, but first you have the quiet.

 Birds mistook St. Francis for a tree. May I be so free of nervous haste, ambition and regret so in the exterpation of thought that innocence and improvisation may tell the dawn each day afresh that fresh is what it is.

 My soul is not asleep. It is awake, wide awake. It neither sleeps nor dreams, but watches, its eyes wide open, sees far - off things, and listens at the shore of the great silence.

A quiet night behind my grass hut. Alone, I play a stringless lute. Its melody drifts to the wind-blown clouds and fades. Its sound deepens with the running stream, expanding till it fills a deep ravine, and echoes through the vast woods. Who, other than a deaf person, can hear this faint song?  

 Silence: the cicada's cry soaks into stone

 I felt in need of a great pilgrimage so I sat still for three days

  I didn't read the news. I raked a rainbow of pungent autumn leaves, played abroad with happy dogs, held my granddaughter in my arms, and sat beneath an amiable maple, attentive to current events.

 Though the air is full of singing my head is loud with the labor of words. Though the season is rich with fruit, my tongue hungers for the sweet of speech. Though the beech is golden I cannot stand beside it mute, but must say "It is golden," while the leaves stir and fall with a sound that is not a name. It is in the silence that my help is, my aim. A song whose line I cannot make or sing sounds men's silence like a root. Let me say and not mourn: the world lives in the death of speech and sings there.

 No, no time for this the outside clamours to be heard, the books, you see, the books. In here it's dark, the sun has slid away. There are necessities. The cars are travelling at speed, with me, fast; the days, my days, must be pinned down,  accounted for and coloured in. I need to go, I need to go my way. to which my soul said Stay.

 This is a poem for someone who is juggling her life, Be still sometimes Be still sometimes It needs repeating over and over to catch her attention over and over, as someone who is juggling her life finds it difficult to hear Be still sometimes Be still sometimes Let it fall sometimes .