24 Dec My Year-End Message

In the aftermath of Sandy Hook, and the arrival of the holidays, I’ve been waiting to share my own perspective until it rang true and clear within me.

I take it as a sacred responsibility to be a person to whom others sometime turn for guidance and inspiration regarding life’s greatest challenges.

Would it help most, I wondered, to share about gun control? Mental illness? Societal illness? Should I stick to emotional connection, about which I’m most knowledgeable and recognized? Should I strike the chord of compassion for all, knowing that it’s the only true path to healing, even at the most impossible times?

Ultimately, none of that felt right. So I kept waiting, certain that I didn’t want to add any more “noise” to an already deafening time.

Then it struck me. In light of all that noise, what I’m most drawn to offer is silence. Silence. The time and space in which each and every one of us can settle into our own truth, our own peace. The opportunity for retreat, and refuge, to feel ourselves fully into presence and self-connection.

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With the lack of content and direction in the line above, what has a chance to arise in you? To be welcomed? Embraced? whether you prefer it to be so or not? And from that place of presence and self-connection, what are you called to be and do in the world? Right now and throughout the season? In a way that rings true and clear within you?

Even if that means waiting, coming back to the silence again and again till you’re sure, nothing could be more important, for you personally or for all the rest of us.

In the words of Rumi,”When I am silent, I fall into that place where everything is music.”

May we all dance to that music, together, through the year’s end and beyond.

Yours in Spirit,

Raphael