The luminosity of silence

"You miss the garden,
because you want a small fig
from a random tree...
Let yourself be silently drawn
by the stronger pull of what you really love."
-- Rumi, A Year with Rumi (April 9)

I am not -- unlike my older daughter -- particularly drawn to shiny things. But I do enjoy sleek curves of steel, both in sculpture and architecture, so when this image created itself yesterday from a pile of cleaning in plastic bags, I called my husband in and said, "Look, dear -- now I can be a SCULPTOR, too!"

I knew I wanted to share it with you, but had no idea what I wanted to say about it until I read these wonderful lines in Robert Sardello's Silence this morning:

"The dazzling obscurity of the secret Silence outshines all brilliance with the intensity of its dark luminosity. Silence shines within us like the reflected image of the sun on a lake. We live within the depths of it, and it glows from our being. It is a liquefying power, an interiorizing power, a liberating power that frees us from the sterile hardness of dead, institutionalized forms, and brings renewal to the world. We are merely the carriers, the transporters of this great mystery, having dipped into it in the depths of contemplation. We bring from the depths some of this mysterious fluidity and offer it to the world. We are graced with the mantle of Silence and dissolve in its diffused brilliance. It opens the door to our heart."

Throughout my meditation this morning, I kept thinking of those lines, "dark luminosity," and "mysterious fluidity." They seem to me to describe this image, and its appeal for me. But they also convey the cool clearness I get in meditation at its best, when I can still the monkey mind and luxuriate in the silence. What's sad, of course, is that despite the allure of the silence, the monkey mind is painfully seductive, rather like Rumi's fig tree in the garden: I keep getting drawn back into my daily concerns, lured by the illusions of taste and smell and color and feeling. Why can I not be more consistently drawn into silence, "by the stronger pull of what I really love"?

Ah, well -- perhaps this image is here to serve as a reminder of what I really love. As I look at it more, it seems almost like some sort of druidic figure, beckoning me into the silence, and, thinking of that, I realize how much I'm looking forward to my upcoming retreat. What a treat it will be, to spend a few days feasting on pure silence!