Quoting Silence, January 2025:
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A post throughout each week of the month, offering quotes and resources linked to one contemporary author who writes about silence and its role as a spiritual discipline. |
The first week of each month has a short, image-backed quote with links to associated resources in the text below it. In other weeks, the short quote is taken from a longer one by the month's author, found below the image. The last week of the month has a short quote and questions to encourage reflection on all the month's quotations and images.
Gunilla Norris, our author for January, is best known as an author of books about everyday spirituality,
You can read more about Gunilla Norris's book,Inviting Silence: Universal Principles of Meditation (BlueBridge, 2004) from which this month's quotes are taken, by clicking here.
You can read more about Gunilla Norris's book,Inviting Silence: Universal Principles of Meditation (BlueBridge, 2004) from which this month's quotes are taken, by clicking here.
Audio resources
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For a 5 minute audio guided meditation to use with each week's short quote, click play on the image. To pause and restart click the same place.
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An audio guided Lectio Divina for the longer quotes. Click play on the image above. Allow 10-15 minutes for this. For a text version, click the button.
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Monday 6th January, 2025
Gunilla Norris, Inviting Silence: Universal Principles of Meditation (BlueBridge, 2004), 49.
Image: Allec Gomes, Goiȃnia, Brazil, unsplash.com/@allecgomes
Gunilla Brodde Norris was born in Argentina in the 1930s to parents who worked in the Swedish diplomatic corps. She had a well-travelled childhood, living predominantly in Sweden and the USA. Now in her mid-80s, Gunilla has worked as a psychotherapist for over 45 years and has been a meditation teacher and workshop leader for many years. Today, she lives in a small, coastal town in Rhode Island on the east coast of the USA.
Gunilla Norris - the name under which she has always written - has been publishing books for almost 60 years! Her earliest books were fiction for children, beginning with The Summer Pasture (1965) - see here. Another 10 or so followed at roughly one a year until 1974 (you can find a full list on this page), after which she moved into writing poetry, with Learning from the Angel (Lotus Press, 1985). Norris then turned towards poetic renderings of everyday spirituality in Being Home: A Book of Meditations (Bell Tower, 1991) - see here for lots of preview pages - in which our daily household tasks are contemplatively examined. Since then, Gunilla has written three further books of poetry - for her latest, Old and Singing (Wayfarer Books, 2023) see here - and another eight books focusing on spirituality in daily life. These range from Care and Prayer: Reflections on the Sacred Task of Caregiving (Twenty-Third Publications, 2022) to Mystic Garden: Working with Soil, Attending to Soul (BlueBridge, 2006). For a full list with abstracts, see the 'Books' tab on Gunilla's website, here. Her latest, Discerning with the Heart: Praying for Guidance and Vision (Twenty-Third Publications, 2024) is a collection of essays that invite us to allow the leanings of our heart to be central in making conscious and faithful choices in life: see here. Some of Norris' spirituality books are available on Audible, but sadly not our book for this month: see here.
Other than books, there aren't that many resources relating to Gunilla Norris available. She regularly posts short comments about spirituality on her facebook page, here, you can find her top 10 quotes here, and an interview with brief, pithy responses for her local newspaper, The Westerly Sun, here.
Monday 13th January, 2025
Gunilla Norris, Inviting Silence: Universal Principles of Meditation (BlueBridge, 2004), 31.
Image: Andriyko Podilnyk, Lviv, Ukraine, unsplash.com/@andriyko
The short, image-backed quote, above, is taken from this week's longer quote, below, on pages 31-34 of Gunilla Norris' book. To read more about Gunilla Norris' book, from which this month's quotes are taken, click here.
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Listen to this week's longer quote:
To listen to the longer quote, below, being read, click the play button on the small version of the image next to or below this text. To see the image full screen as you listen, click the expand screen icon in the corner. |
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'In our present culture silence is something like an endangered species—an endangered fundamental. We need it badly.
Silence brings us back to basics, to our senses, to our selves. It locates us. Without that return we can go so far away from our true natures that we end up, quite literally, beside ourselves. We live blindly and act thoughtlessly. We endanger the delicate balance which sustains our lives, our communities, and our planet.
Can we remember our power as persons? Can we remind ourselves and others that, nurtured in silence, our awareness can lead us back to integrity and meaning? Each of us has and is a holy capability.
It may take months for us to sense that our longing has already taken the first small steps. Can we begin to notice some of the signs? How we pause before something beautiful? How we grow inexplicably silent more of the time? How our breath seeks deeper exhalation? How we close our eyes and gaze inward as if drawn to another realm? Can we catch our softening eyes when we watch our children at play, when our pets are up to their antics, when we hold the ageing hands of our parents?
These moments are hints that tell us there is something inside that doesn’t live on a schedule, doesn’t entirely define itself by accomplishing tasks or by keeping things going! This part of us trusts another dimension, the central fact of being. It already knows that simple presence is where our hearts come to peace. How strange that it takes so long to be in touch with this—the most obvious fact of our lives.
Cultivating a peaceful heart is the journey of a lifetime. When this truth comes fully into awareness we can join it—a conscious first step. We can start to be with our being.'