Month: January 2018

Silence is not easily found in Western society nowadays. In many households the television is on all day even when no-one is watching or listening. People are locked into their mobiles and I-pods and do not hear the sound of birds or children playing.

Yet silence remains a precious gift which goes way beyond any words we may speak. As Claudio says in Much Ado About Nothing, ‘Silence is the perfect’st herald of joy; I were little happy if I could say how much’.

In our practice of meditation we sit in silence. We learn that — in the words of the Welsh poet R.S.Thomas — ‘the meaning is in the waiting’. Slowly, over weeks and months, the sands within us shift and change; we find ourselves growing into a deeper aware-ness, more alert to the needs of others, while neuroses and other problems dissolve of their own accord. We have only to persevere in our practice.

Once a small boy said to me with much passion, ‘God is a feel, not a think’ and I thought: Wow! Children have such remarkable insight and directness.

There was a period when — as the author of the seven books of The Adventures of Odd and Elsewhere — I would be invited to schools and libraries in England and Ireland to tell stories about my two heroes. The children were about nine or ten, and time and again I found myself startled by their directness. On one occasion — with the whole school crowded into the hall, seated cross-legged on the floor — a small boy at the front asked: ‘Where do you get the ideas for your books?’ He said it with such urgency and I could sense the whole school waiting to hear how I would respond. In a flash I said to him, ‘Do you have a garden?’ He said ‘yes’. I then asked him what he grew in it. ‘Seeds’ he replied, ‘and they grow into plants.’

I knew then that I had my answer: ‘And I have seeds of ideas. I plant them in my books and they grow into stories!’ There was an audible sigh of satisfaction around the hall.

On another occasion I took along a very old teddy bear which had been given to me, one of the first ever made. It was dressed in a frock so I called her Harmony. At one school a small boy asked why she was called this, so I said ‘Why do you think?’ He paused for a few moments and then said, ‘Because she doesn’t harm anyone!’

And harmony means exactly that. It is the state into which — if we persevere with our practice of meditation — we arrive: we are at harmony within ourselves and so will never hurt or wound another, while also we become more awake to the needs of others.