When my eight days of silence and retreat came to an end, I marveled how I had survived adulthood without a yearly retreat! Sure, I’ve had vacations, but vacations are simply plans to do new activities somewhere else. This retreat, however, like my daily walk, was a stripping away, a purposeful decision to remove all distractions and do nothing but seek God.
I experienced this still serenity as a child in summers at the farm. This is where I tasted long soulful days filled with the stuff of monks. Sweeping old dusty outbuildings, feeding the chickens, their low clucks calling the others, stepping barefoot through the milkweed to the elderberry bushes that grew in the ditch at the edge of the woods. I spent hours in my attic room reading and writing in the hot thick air, a mattress, a journal and an dusty trunk my only amenities. I did not miss my home in the suburbs. I was complete to cup the goat’s sticky grain under her nose and feel her fuzzy lips in my palms. There, in her stall, sweet with fresh hay and the hushed bleats of her new kid, God’s universe whispered.
I think my soul has always longed to go back to Carla’s barn and that attic room. Big Pop Pop’s farm taught me how to hear the things unspoken, how to enter the spaces uninhabited, how to cultivate life in fields lying fallow. God is here. He will speak to you, He will till your wild soul and plant something beautiful.
And hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us. Romans 5:5
Meeting God at the Park 