Home from the San Francisco bay area where I was leading a silent retreat at San Damiano Retreat Center in Danville. The 84 retreatants were edifyingly quiet. I was inspired by their faithfulness to the silence. The photos here surely portray that this is a place of graced beauty and you might consider coming here some day for a soul journey.
The amusing irony of it all, which may actually be a bit prophetic, is that I lost my voice almost as soon as the retreat was over. Perhaps God is telling me to eat my own words. I flew back to Arkansas in silence, even wrote a note to the airline attendant so she would know what I wanted to drink.
Every experience is a teacher and so I am trying to learn from this silence that was not on my schedule. Most of the things on my TO DO LIST for today I have put aside. Sleeping, reading, resting, caring for my health: those things I tend to put on the back burner, are right up front now. They have my attention. At the moment I can only whisper. It is silent in my heart too. The prayers of the retreatants have followed me home in silence.
I think we talk
because
what lives inside silence
scares us.
-spoken by Angel in Linda Hogan's book, Solar Storms
