Entering into meditation is like slipping into water and floating on our backs. Lying with the immensity of the sky above and the depth of the ocean beneath us, we float. We are at one with the sea and the sky, only a slight movement of the hands helping us to keep afloat, rather as, in meditation, we watch the breath coming in and going out.
And so now, as we each enter our meditation, let us allow ourselves to float in the Great Silence.
On the wall, facing me as I sit at my desk, are some words calligraphed on canvas by my friend John Rowlands-Pritchard, the founder of Opus Anglicanum. The words are: ‘At midnight noon is born.’
It is a reminder that at those moments of deepest darkness in our lives a new life is stirring, a new day will dawn with fresh opportunities. Nature has its own wisdom.
I recall how my life’s companion, Hywel Jones, in the first years of our knowing each other, wrote to me after spending a few days with his family in the village of Llangynog in the Berwyn Mountains. ‘The wonderful peace and quiet of the dark that I remember from my childhood is still here,’ he wrote. ‘We must try and spend some time together here, because after dark the mountains and the stillness have a kind of spiritual quality and I am sure it would help us to share it together.’
This is one of the things one learns from the practice of meditation: to wait, not knowing when the dawn will come – but certain, nonetheless, that our inner sun will rise.
