Ruah Bull - Spiritual Director

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

 The desire of your heart awaits the quiet moment of  creative love. With courage, step into silence.

 The things you do not have to say make you rich. Saying the things you do not have to say weakens your talk.  Hearing things you do not have to hear dulls your hearing, And things you know before you hear them - those are you, Those are why you are in the world.

 On my first retreat I brought a suitcase full   of books on silence And sat entranced by pages and pages on mindfulness, mysticism. ,  I didn't hear the fountain glisten or smell unfolding purple or notice cool bands of moving shadow. If  every creature is a Word of God This one was loud luminous, insistent. I don't know what she said but her feet were so small, her wings diaphanous with speed. The garden around me  within me  awakens.

 Let yourself be silently drawn by the strange pull  of what you really love. It will not lead you astray

 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.

 All tempest has, like a naval, a hole in its middle though which a gull can fly in silence.

 the spirit, the truth of silent prayer - just the moon on the road

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?  

 Speechless before these budding green spring leaves in blazing sunlight.

 Silence: the cicada's cry soaks into stone

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

 In our souls everything moves guided by a mysterious hand. We know nothing of our souls that are ununderstandable and say nothing. The deepest words of the wise man teach us the same as the whistle of the wind when it blows or the sound of the water when it is flowing.

 At the monastic center is always a cloister, an orchestrated emptiness, a place of light, a fountain to feed the heart's garden. Give me this life: a center empty of all but light, the stillness of Eden before fruit was plucked, my heart a spring of living water.

 Silent Night, Holy Night All is calm, all is bright Round yon Virgin, Mother and Child  Holy infant so tender and mild Sleep in heavenly peace Sleep in heavenly peace Glories stream from heaven afar Heavenly hosts sing Hallelujah Christ the Savior is born Christ the Savior is born

 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.

  What if we enter each day so silently, so seamlessly the birds don't sound alarms and dart away, our minds so well released from fits of thought we are kin to all that breathes, like grazing deer  hidden in dapples of green. O how we would walk then light hoofed and elfin eyed, even on crowded days, each trembling leaf a welcome Silky beating wings would cool our errant fevers of mind would keep us filled with awe and kind

But the silence in the mind is when we live best, within listening distance of the silence we call God. This is the deep calling to deep of the psalm - writer, the bottomless ocean we launch the armada of our thoughts on, never arriving. It is a presence, then, whose margins are our margins, that calls us out over our fathoms. What to do but draw a little nearer to such ubiquity by remaining still?

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

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