When someone deeply listens to you it is like holding out a dented cup you’ve had since childhood and watching it fill up with cold, fresh water. When it balances on top of the brim, you are understood. When it overflows and touches your skin, you are loved. When someone deeply listens to you, the […]
You will never be alone, you hear so deep a sound when autumn comes. Yellow pulls across the hills and thrums, or in the silence after lightning before it says its names - and then the clouds’ wide-mouthed apologies. You were aimed from birth: you will never be alone. Rain will come, a gutter filled, […]
All was taken away from you: white dresses, wings, even existence. Yet I believe you, messengers. There, where the world is turned inside out, a heavy fabric embroidered with stars and beasts, you stroll, inspecting the trustworthy seems. Short is your stay here: now and then at a matinal hour, if the sky is clear, […]
The taut wire hums before it breaks, like the city in the morning or late, when the lights go out. And the chain on the bridge gate— before it snaps, one link turns over slowly, and creaks. I watch an oak whose top has forgotten […]
In a narrative essay titled “Teaching a Stone to Talk” (found in the book by the same name), the author Annie DIllard describes an eccentric man trying to teach a stone how to talk. Several times a day, he removes his stone from the shelf, a dark gray, “palm-sized oval beach cobble”, and proceeds with […]
Silence asserts not. It is simple nothingness Around every sound. Like God, silence waits To be heard among the thoughts. It never changes. Not to soothe with balm, Silence calls to stimulate, To notice no-thing. The song of silence Teaches one to listen, and Imbues with Presence.
My deepest desire and most longing want is to see the face of Jesus Christ. Based on one of the Beatitudes, my daily prayer is for God to purify my heart so that I may see Him, see Him in others, and for others to see Him in me. I often think or imagine or […]
In every experience of true listening, especially to God but also to another person, there is a mysterious moment in which the one who listens steps out from a fortress of self-concern and dwells silently in the truth of the one who speaks. — John S. Mogabgab