silent retreat april 2024
welcome words before stepping into silence :
' invitation au voyage '
here we are gathered at the onset of a week of immersion in silence and stillness in the secluded hills of serra de monchique where on clear days you can see the hills rolling, for now lush and emerald green, and descend imperceptibly and slowly to the coastline where they merge with the ocean and return home to the invisible.
the valleys are deep here with the sky arraying the changing colors of vastness that include passages of storms but also different hues and tones of human longing. bright here, dark there yet open right before us, holding us, carrying us, an imperturbable, ungraspable serenity.
the journey that has brought us together for a few days did not begin and will not end here. maybe part of what we are about to embark upon is envisaging that some journeys, maybe the most significant ones in life, are simply ongoing, unfolding, and as such have no beginning and no end in view.
they are open-ended invitations to a voyage that does not culminate in a dreamed or imagined destination but leaps rather beyond milestones, signposts, destinations simply out of the love of wayfaring and, as such, like the wind itself, has non-ceasing and like the mind itself, has non-abiding as its undestined yet true destiny.
an invitation to present oneself to an inquiry, to a questioning where traveler, path and destination, departures and arrivals, all come under scrutiny, and by virtue of the presence and the attention that deep questioning invites to are, along the path and with the path, effaced and dissolved. released from the questions is to be effaced by the inquiry and to be released back to openness one never departs from.
this unbounded vista, this vastness before you offering itself to your contemplation, look closely, look closely, what is it, what is it you are seeing?
your original face, the face of your parents before you were born?
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