THE BIG WOODS

Wendell Berry wrote, “Always in big woods when you leave familiar ground and step off alone into a new place there will be, along with the feelings of curiosity and excitement, a little nagging of dread. It is the ancient fear of the unknown, and it is your first bond with the wilderness you are going into, you are undertaking the first experience, not of the place, but of yourself in that place. It is an experience of our essential loneliness, for nobody can discover the world for anybody else. It is only after we have discovered it for ourselves that it becomes a common ground and a common bond, and we cease to be alone.”

I say, from “the big woods” to the Big Silence it is very much the same. It is simply a place of the unknown because though we may have been to silence many times before perhaps… this time is different. What we learn in the big woods and the big silence is that we don’t go to either of them…they come to us… if we will be still.

“It is written in the Prophets, ‘And they will all be taught by God.’ Everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to me.” Jesus