“Four a.m. – The Silence is so intense that the striking of a distant clock comes into it like sounds from another world. How bright the stars are! How still the trees! Neither branches nor leaves are in motion. Everything seems to be waiting for something to happen. It is a time when the veil between the worlds is thin. There seems neither space nor time between the unseen and the seen. I am aware, as never during the day, of the threshold leading from life to greater life, for all creation as for me. Assurance becomes reassurance. Words of Socrates come into my mind, ‘Nothing can harm a good person in this world or the next.’ In the holy stillness, I think of death; not with fear or longing but with expectancy as a time of ingathering. If I have felt at home in this life, shall I not feel even more so in the life to come? If I have lived fully here, shall I not live even more fully in the continuation?”
A Book of Hours by Elizabeth Yates
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