In solitude is the wonder of the commonplace...

Sometimes I feel like a little child happily rummaging in an eschatological toy box: the toys are icons and the play is for keeps. One of the toys in this box is a theological construction set. It isn't safe to hang anything on the models I build with it, but they catch light refracting from the soul.

Sometimes solitude is like balancing on the edge of a razor blade with a meadow full of wildflowers on one side and madness on the other. Or solitude is like a tea ceremony, the celebration of life in all its homely movements taken out of time.

In solitude is the wonder of the commonplace, the mystery of ordinary life: eating, sleeping, reading, listening to God's secrets and jokes, a sense of delight, of dance, of fruition, learning that solitude is not something we need to scramble to fill up, but that it is full and overflowing if we can learn to accept the familiarity of insecurity and let go into Silence.

Solitude is the essence of relatedness; solitude is being poured-out-through. We evolve toward simplicity; we dwell in the Word.

Maggie Ross, from The Fire of Your Life: A Solitude Shared, Seabury Books, 2007.

The wonder of the commonplace - yes, and yet it is so often in that commonplace that the way opens onto the sword-bridge, high in the grey wind and comfortless, leading out across no-thing to nowhere we could even understand... and the next minute you realise that it's God's hand in yours, and his kindly gift of frailty reminding you that you are just human, after all, and need to eat, and sleep, like any other creature. There is such refuge, then, in being flesh and blood, and in knowing Christ came this way before...