The anxieties of old age unclenching into grace - John O'Donohue

If we could be mindful of how short our time is, we might learn how precious each day is.

Meister Eckhart said that nothing in the universe resembles God so much as silence, so if you think about silence in that sense, then to come into silence is to come into the presence of the Divine. In a way, you allow yourself to be enfolded by that stillness. In a real sense, the deepest thing in a human heart is not the verbiage but is actually that still silence — not the silence of Buddhism, which often seems to me maybe something anonymous — but is the silence of intimacy where no word is needed and where a word would actually be a fracture.

May the expectation in other eyes Never decide how you are to be;