This cartoon makes me think of my Quaker friend Christine O’Brien, who died last November ending a beautiful life, deeply lived. We would have had a great conversation about it, laughing, talking about Zen koans, Quaker meetings in which not a word is said, but everyone feels connected and full of love at the end, or about brief but powerful messages, like “Attention” that get everyone vibrating silently. She would bring out one of her little Paragraph magazines, and read a prose poem we both would consider “cosmic”.
And we would sit and watch the light move across her patio and through the French doors into the dining room, playing shadows across art objects, dried flowers, rows of little stones and beads, books, lots of natural wood and wonderful, wonderful food in handmade plates.
What some people call “religious” is just a bunch of noise and anxiety. You really don’t have to say, or hear, a thing to feel connected to something powerful. In fact, the less said, the better.