The Quiet Company We Keep ~ “In the stillness, I am beginning to understand that I have never truly been sitting here alone.”

I often find myself wondering about the women who came before me.

Not in a searching or urgent way… but in quieter moments when the light falls just so, or when I’m sitting in stillness and something within me feels familiar, yet unnamed.

I think about their lives.

The ones I know in fragments… and the many I don’t know at all.

What did they carry?

What did they hold without words?

What parts of their lives were lived in silence, simply because there was no space to speak them?

And I wonder how much of that still moves quietly through me.

Not in ways that are always visible but in reactions, in patterns, in the way I’ve learned to hold things close or keep things hidden.

This isn’t a story that began with me.

There were women before me who lived full, complex lives who loved, endured, worked, raised, lost, and carried more than we may ever fully understand.

And perhaps, in ways both seen and unseen, I carry pieces of them forward.

Not just their strength ~ but their silences too.

And as I sit with that, there is something that begins to shift not in urgency, but in awareness.

A quiet recognition that what I feel, what I’ve lived, may not be mine alone. And in that knowing, something softens ~ not everything needs to be uncovered all at once.

Not everything needs to be named immediately.

But there is something meaningful in simply recognising that we are part of a story still unfolding.

And that even in the quiet ~ we are not standing nor sitting here alone.

And so it is in this quiet company, I find the courage to remain gently carrying forward what has been entrusted to me.

Lord,

In this quiet company, help me to recognise Your presence in those who came before me, in the stillness around me, and in the gentle unfolding of my own life.

Teach me to trust what is being revealed slowly, to honour what has been carried, and to walk forward with a heart that is open and aware.

Amen 🙏🏼