wait without hope

saying peace

Wait without Hope

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope

For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,

For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith

But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.

Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:

So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.

Whisper of running streams, and winter lightning.

The wild thyme unseen and the wild strawberry,

The laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy

Not lost, but requiring, pointing to the agony

Of death and birth

T.S.Eliot

showing peace

Photo by Ahmad Odeh on Unsplash

doing peace

the theme today is inner peace

This poem by the American born, UK based poet T.S. Eliot could seem a bit bleak at first glance - wait without hope? But the idea of waiting for the wrong thing - love, faith, hope or even knowledge, asks a fundamental question about what it is to be at one with your self.

When you are doing nothing, not reading, or doing chores, or learning, or playing, when you are genuinely still in your mind and body, what do you think? what do you feel? what pops into your head?
Imagine that the dancer in the picture, who is captured moving and twirling, has stopped, a frozen moment of time. Imagine what it feels like to know that you will soon be turning again but you are still for that moment, like time has stopped.
Now listen to the stillness in the dancing, the quiet in the hubbub, the darkness in the light - what are these things?
Inner peace can be finding the stillness between your heartbeats, the pause between your breath. So what is waiting without hope? This question is one of the bases of much mindfulness practice, across lots of different traditions, from meditation to prayer - it is the stilling of the mad rush, that is life, to notice the unobvious, the subtle, and to glory in its ubiquity (it being everywhere).
How does it feel to ask this?

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