Have you been heard today?

All around  simple things, a basket of pine cones collected on a warm September day, strewn everywhere waiting to be picked up. The basket from a thrift store for a dollar. Dried weeds in a shiny handmade grey pot. A stone, with impossible green and pink colors, rounded by years of tossing in the Sea that holds the mystical island of Iona.

 On a shelf a green, red and beige wooden flute with an indigenous face carved on it from the thrift store. A plain brown ceramic pot sits next to it. It holds the pebble sized black morning glory seeds. In them is next year's dream of blue. Cuttings from long lived plants in water and clear glass. Catching the afternoon light, all these bring life to my desk, my writing room.

The monks that lived on Skellig Michael Island off the coast of Ireland centuries ago each had a stone beehive hut to sleep and pray in. Their life was one of meditating and deprivation. They ate small plants that they grew in the rocky soil and praised God for simple things like the sunrise. It is said that when a boat would come, the sailors who arrived would be struck silent by the joy that shone from the monk's faces.

What could account for this; those poor monks deprived of the internet, TV, waterbeds and Rap?

It is the quiet, the way they support each other, the praying, the stories they tell of God's goodness.
How they accept that each are not perfect but seek only the good. How they live in the present. But perhaps most importantly,  in that removed, simple place, they are heard, really heard by God and each other. The monks of Skellig left their island long ago but I see their faces each Wednesday in Room 200 when our writing group meets.