Each day, between 4pm-5pm, a network of people from across Australia (and perhaps, beyond) spend time in contemplation. They are members of the Contemplative Evolution Network. This network was founded by Ballarat-based Mercy Sister, Madeleine Duckett, and Corrie van den Bosch MSS has been part of the network for several years. It is a daily commitment to spend that one hour in contemplation, ‘holding in love our broken, suffering world’. This month, Corrie provided the following reflection for contemplation:
Yesterday I spent the day with a group from our walking club in the Cobaw Forest, part of the Great Dividing Range, in Victoria’s Goldfields area. It was a glorious winter day. A clear blue sky and the warmth of the morning sun soon melted the night’s white frost. On getting out of the car, I noticed the fragrance of the clear winter air and the profound silence of the forest.
As we began our walk, the silence was shattered by white cockatoos, which populate the area in abundance. It seemed as if they were protesting at our presence in ‘their space’… or were they excited at sharing ‘their space’ with us? I will never know what they may have been saying in their deafening cacophony.
Our walk took us beyond the cockatoos’ territory and once again we found ourselves in that profound silence. The occasional twitter of birds and a momentary breeze rustling the leaves accentuated the silence. It was balm for my soul. As we walked up and down the hills and among great granite boulders, I wondered, ‘What is their story? What is the ancestry that birthed the sandy soil and ancient ferns and fungi?’ When I ask such questions, I am taken into an even more profound silence—the story of the birth and evolution of the Cosmos. When we trace our individual stories back far enough, we find our human ancestry and theirs evolved from that same creative process. Everything around me is part of that ongoing story.
Read Corrie’s full reflection on the Contemplative Evolution Network, here.