Читать книгу Close to the Bone - Jean Shinoda Bolen - Страница 11

In noisy wards and crowded waiting rooms of county hospitals and clinics, in quiet private rooms in medical-center pavilions or in well-appointed waiting rooms, examining rooms, or offices, wherever there are patients, there are long moments of silence, pauses sometimes preceded by a sigh, a transient stillness when the air feels heavier. When the eyes of the patient or others who are there turn inward. When someone retreats inside as others chatter, or seems to be somewhere else even as the doctor is explaining something important. Sometimes I have glimpsed that same look with its attendant quiet on the face of a doctor or nurse. Occasionally, a room suddenly, collectively, goes silent in this same deep way. When this happened in ancient Greece, people would observe: “Hermes has entered.”

Hermes was the messenger god and the guide of souls to the underworld; dreams and divination came under his auspices. Today, when that hush happens, someone might break the silence with, “An angel has come.” A subtle perceptible shift in the air unaccountably occurs that people from ancient times to the present have attributed to the presence of invisible winged messengers from the eternal world. In these moments, the persona or face we wear for the ordinary world to see drops away and the mind is empty of its preoccupations and responsibilities and we are with soul.