Soulcare: Spaces of Silence
Oct 16, 2024
By: Donna Lawson
“An early morning walk is a blessing for the whole day.”
~Henry David Thoreau
As a young woman I can distinctly remember how I used to get up early in the morning and walk barefooted in the morning dew upon the grass before everyone in my family and the community woke up.
In remembrance of those mornings, the imagery and feel of the morning dew, (the water that forms in the form of small droplets on grass and leaves) on the large area of grass and trees behind my childhood home is as real in this moment as I write these words. I can almost feel again the transcendent calling away from myself into a world beyond the world of the grass.
I loved walking in the grass of the morning dew, as I was walking with little to no interrupted thoughts. And after walking, I would sit on the back porch chair with my head tilted back and look upward towards the sky without a care in the world. The morning was always still and quiet with a now and then rustle of the leaves by wind or animal. Until one morning, my mother walked out onto the back porch and said to me, “You are always somewhere with your head in the clouds.” Maybe she didn’t intend her words to interrupt my silence. But they did. I brought my head forward, rose from my seat, entered the house and never walked in the dew of the morning grass ever again.
Looking back and connecting the dots, those morning walks were my spaces of silence.
I often wonder if I would have discovered contemplative life sooner had I kept walking in the early morning dew? Decades later, to my surprise, I have learned that walking is a contemplative practice. What I knew in my soul many years ago was that these early morning walks helped me to enter the silence, to a sacred space beyond myself, beyond the trees and beyond my circumstances.
