On my worst days, it is gravity I am most grateful for: the way the earth pulls at me from her core, yearns for me, keeps me pressed tightly against her surface. When my own core is hollowed out, when I have no more mass than a leaf dead on the branch, still this is enough for the earth to find me.

I invite you to enter a period of quiet for a guided meditation. You may wish to adjust your position so that your spine is straight, your body relaxed, your hands resting gently in your lap. You will probably want to close your eyes and shut out all the distractions of the light....

Let this be a place of warm and gentle silence: the silence that soothes and comforts the wounded, the silence that yields insights into heart and soul, the silence that calms, the silence the listens, the silence that speaks, the silence that renews. Let this be a place of warm and gentle silence.

Night has its own kind of beauty, different than the beauty of day. Night is a time of sleep and dreams and inward visions, A time of pause within activity. Darkness is an invitation to imagining and storytelling, And to using ears instead of eyes to listen to the world in its stillness....

Let us join hearts in the spirit of meditation and prayer: Juntemos corazones en el espiritu de meditacion y oracion: Mysterious Presence, Presencia misteriosa, God, our Father and our Mother, Dios, nuestro Padre y nuestra Madre, Spirit of Life whom we struggle to name in our joys and our sorrows...

Silence is not always golden. Sometimes, silence is a contempt for goodness; silence is a consent for atrocities; silence is a scorn for humanity. Often, it is better to scream.

If God is your strength and companion and prayer the means of centering your thoughts, There is room for you here. If the teachings of the Buddha give you clarity and calm in the midst of human striving, There is room for you here If Gaia’s seasonal rhythms lead you best through the myriad steps...

Let us seek the quiet and the calm Let us lay aside our loud calling Let us lay aside our struggle Speak softly: let us listen to the melodies that recall other proportions Our moments tarry not with us Let us then seek the dimension that endures beyond all nowness and hereness beyond all...

Giver of being and freedom, thou who touches our lives in unforeseen ways, who unsettles our ease and upsets our self-satisfactions: We wait in these moments of stillness to let the hidden processes of healing and growth do their silent work within us, and to let the quiet work of reconciliation ...

Quiet yourself and listen to the rhythm of your breath, your heart . . .Listen to the silence . . .

Let us take a moment to settle into the silence. Hear and feel your quiet breathing. Hear and feel the quiet of this room and this community of quiet people. As we sit in the quiet, feel the life that stretches between us, that fills this room....

In the moments when Word is silence give yourself to it in wholeness and wait. Let the knowing of this primal sound carry you into circles where sound itself— where silence itself—becomes new and the new a song you sing from your bones.

As we settle into our seat all of our life comes down with us, like an extended slinky retracting into a single cylinder Back you snap into this body and breath where each day is born and done familiar in this cushion familiar in this ache....