I have been listening to Thich Nhat Hanh’s book, SILENCE: The Power of Quiet in a World Full of Noise, and listening has taken me back to my true passion and first love—learning.

I know exactly what I would be doing if I had been born independently wealthy.  I would be a perpetual student.  I would study and learn new and different things just for the sake of knowing.  I could imagine myself at a university or two or three in various libraries, reading, writing papers, engaging the authors of essays and books, and just having a literal good, ole time!  When I was 10 or 11 years old, I started reading encyclopedias for fun.  My friends thought I was weird.  I guess I was.  It was only as an adult that I discovered other adults who had done something similar as children.

But alas, I was not born independently wealthy and “worked for a living” as some would say.  Yet, as I reflect back there is no work that I have taken on that has ever stopped me from learning.  I will always be a perpetual student.  I have come to realize that my entire life has been a lesson of learning through the hills and valleys of my lived experiences.

I perceive LIFE, for the most part, as being all about lessons.  At least that is what keeps me in peace and on the road to openness and receptivity to what IS.  For example, I believe that learning to know who we truly are versus who we so often THINK we are (or have been conditioned to believe that we are) is the biggest lesson most of us will ever face.

Consider, too, that if we are each born with the image of GOD inside us, then, our true nature is ONE with GOD and is GOD whether realized or unrealized.

We are ONE with GOD and GOD is ONE with us; both GOD + HUMAN BEING, divine and human, yet unknown to ourselves for the most part.  As St. Irenaeus of the 2nd century CE was known to have taught, “God became a human being, so that human beings could become GOD.

There is so much to know about LIFE and very little of it can be processed or digested without some form of Silence.  Our post-modern lives, filled with the noises of “living,” circumvents the fullness of LIFE that we often crave.  I commend the book, SILENCE, to you especially in audio form, because I have always known, and Thich Nhat Hanh’s book has confirmed my passion for learning of and within— LIFE.

Question:  What is YOUR passion?  What FRUIT does it bear?

With Love,
Freda Marie+