A name is a holy place. The name is a womb that nourishes the one who bears it with all the love and hope mingled in the giving of the name. If not dictated by some angel, names are chosen carefully for for saints or statesmen, prophets or poets, family doctors or relatives or places with wonderful sounds. Names are chosen with love in gratitude or by faith in potential or for hope of intercession. Names carry meaning within them, every year of life drawing out the meaning of the life named.
There is the silence in which everything exists, and then there is the noise in my head that I have come to take as the natural background to my life. It has occurred to me that perhaps the trick is to begin to see the silence as the background and the noise as moving across it. The silence, the plain existence of things, is what is real; the thoughts are clouds.