Not strange to each other ~ silence dialogues with silence
Nov 8, 2019
Saying For Today: I could feel inwardly this was an expression of essence, so intimacy meets intimacy.
After the surgery, under observation and now awake, I feel an unusual depth of peace. She, the nurse, stands beside me, while I look forward quietly. She does not speak. I feel the slight weight of her right hand resting on my shoulder and upper arm. I look, see it, and sense the silent joy from receiving the touch. I do not say anything, but her hand says so much. Nothing needs to be said, not in words, the giving and receiving is enough. I look back forward, still feeling the hand. I rest quietly grateful for this simple, sublime gift of connection of two that others might call strangers to each other. But strangers require strangeness, and this is not strange at all, we are not strange to each other.
In recalling this the day after the surgery, the title of a previous work arose to me, written almost two years prior. It is "Reaching across the Abyss." In that, I wrote the following, after meeting a dear woman...
So appreciative she is, that we are here. She has shared her sense of loneliness, of being unloved, and her pain of memories of the past. I have held her hand. I have been present, often not speaking. Before leaving, I bend down and we embrace. She is sacred, her story of pain and bliss holy, and she does not need fixing. She needs to be loved. And we can hear that in her voice, as we turn to leave, the voice that speaks the gratitude of the heart that someone is here, someone cares. No, she does not need to be fixed, but seen, truly seen, heard, truly heard, and touched with Kindness. And in that, heart and heart reach across an abyss, and Love happens again. Love does that, you know?
I like that "heart with heart," seems to say so much about how you've said that in giving we receive, that there is really only one giving, subject with subject. And that Love seeks to particularize itself through form.
Yes, precious memories are created in such times of sharing, whether you play the role of giver or receiver. The hand on my shoulder, by the kind nurse, that will live with me always, for such heartful generosity is timeless and knows no distance. We need to remember to aspire to share in creating good memories for others, ones that they will return to again and again, even after the death of our body, recalling and feeling the sweetness of that moment. In time, even a hand placed on a patient can be the hand of Grace, that moment can survive death, for Love is deathless.
Could you feel that depth of experience, when she rested her hand on you?
Yes. I could feel inwardly this was an expression of essence, so intimacy meets intimacy. It was more than a nurse resting a hand on the body. This was more than her just trying to be a good nurse, doing her job as she was trained to do. When you live from your essence, you can easily discern these matters, you can feel when the essence of another is reaching out to you.
You would way she was loving you?
Yes. We seem afraid of saying such now, for it seems too intimate, too personal, and the term love has become so sexualized by many. Yet, every career needs to be a vocation, a sacred means to love others.
Again, as I understand you, from sharing in the past, it wasn't personal. And it would be God resting a hand on you.
The universal is never personal, and Love is universal. Yet, the boundless passes through the person, while, in itself, the universal never becomes personal, only uses the body-and-mind. Love can be mediated by a rock, a tree, an animal, a sunset, a drop of rain, a poem, a song, a smile, ...
As to God resting a hand on me. Absolutely true! If only persons knew God in this way, so intimate, so embodied, not far off, not like a judge in the sky. Nonduality teacher and student of the late Jean Klein, Francis Lucille, put it well in his The Perfume of Silence, "God sees God." Of yesterday, could we say, "God touched God" or "God comforted God"? This meaning that the nurse was the means of more than her personality, her gender, her role as nurse, ... And I was more than my personality, my gender, my role as patient, ...
Borders on what many would call blasphemy.
Could it not be that persons blaspheme by not affirming such, denying God as God, placing God in the picture frame religions have tried to place and keep God within? Would you prefer a God somewhere looking down, or a God that can be in, through, and as the body-and-mind of a kind human being touching you to console you? God was showing up as others in that room, also, including the doctor who did the surgery. I enjoyed God through those in the operating room, as we talked and laughed together. If you take God with you into an operating room, you will find God there when you get there. Wherever you go with this consciousness of oneness, you find oneness waiting for you. It arises between you and others, rarely do you not sense a reciprocation returning to you.
This is the Word becoming flesh that you spoke of recently?
Yes, the unseen Word communicates itself in action, even as we might speak kindly to someone or give them a gift. The timeless enters time; the placeless enters place.
Why didn't you speak with her, only looked and then away?
It was not a time to speak. It was a time to honor the silence. The Christian Scriptures speak of this as nonlinear time, time of fulfillment, or kairos. The Word speaks, that is, acts, from Itself, from silence. This even as the Christian and Jewish Scriptures begin, "In the beginning, God said, 'Let there be...'." Repeatedly, we see this recurrent theme in the hymn of creation, the creating One speaking from silence and, then, movement back into the primal silence. The wording of the Word, action of the Unseen, leads us back to silence. Here, the nurse and I not looking at each other and not speaking is a dialogue of silence with silence, and, likewise, when I hugged the woman who was lonely and felt unloved ~ in that embrace, nothing needed to be said, for silence surrounded the embrace.
The abyss you refer to is where?
The abyss is the silent distance. The Silence acts to connect us in time-and-space, so to lead us back home to silence, to Itself. Every relational happening is intended to guide us back to the silence, to home, to where we came from at first.
Yet, we get stuck in the act itself.
Yes. In traditional language, we get stuck in creation, we forget the Creator. In the image of Word, we get immersed in words, that is, the action, the forms, and we forget the Word, the formless. That which is good by being given by the Good, becomes our ultimate Good. We get lost in time, space, and matter. We forget home, we forget the body is a word of the Word. Yet, even the hand of the nurse or my being with that lonely woman who felt unloved, those acts can be means to remind and return us home to Grace. Remembering is central to all the great religions; we rediscover God in relationship with others, for we are means of God. God shows up, when you show up.
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*The theme of "Lotus of the Heart" is 'Living in Love beyond Beliefs.' This work is presented by Brian K. Wilcox, of Maine, USA. You can order Brian's book, An Ache for Union: Poems on Oneness with God through Love, through major online booksellers.
