Quaker Meeting House
Damariscotta, Maine
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Sounds of Traffic... Birdsong...
Sunlight... Gentle Breeze...
guests arriving through
open window -
resting in Silence... here
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COMMENTARY
Meditating, some would say. Relaxing, open awareness. Thoughts and sensations come and go. Breathings in and out.
Can there be silence in a room and a mind filled with sounds? Where do sounds and silence come from and go to?
When in silence, be a valley; otherwise, you will never cease striving and never arriving. Stop striving, and you will not need to arrive.
Breathe wakefully - you do not have to sit in a special posture, you do not have to call it anything.
Heaven, nirvana, the beloved, god, goddess, grace, spacious luminosity, natural great perfection... is here. And you are always here, even when you forget. Here is where you become lost, and here is where you are when found.
Open window, open you. Presence spacious as the sky. Clouds come, go - not sky. Each sense a door visitors walk through. The body, entryway to the Inner Sanctuary, Inner that is everywhere.
Why fight with clouds? Intimacy with the sky is intimacy with the clouds. Intimacy with the clouds is intimacy with the sky.
CAPPING VERSE
Sunny morning, open window.
Winter changing into spring -
close, not here.
Resting in Silence,
sounds arise, arrive,
leave - nowhere to nowhere.
Silence,
not absence, presence -
invitational.
Not reaching out,
relaxing,
the world comes to you.
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(C) brian wilcox, 2026
