the PDF of her book - National Aphasia Association

x Ruth Codier Resch Without Utterance:
dependent on my doctor and perhaps on the staff in a hospital. For food,
I’m dependent on my local grocer and on all the transportation people who
get the food to his store and, of course, on the farmers and the natural world
from which the food comes in the first place.
For a mystic, though, this sense of connectedness and mutual
interdependency goes much deeper. The obvious links that make our
everyday lives run smoothly are important, but there are unseen, less obvious
connections that weave us all into a profound web of life. A mystic is someone
who is sensitive to these deeper links, who is aware that there is more going
on beneath the surface that ties us one to another in a dynamic system of
constantly evolving wholeness.
The mystical life is one that is sensitive to the presence of wholeness and
to its efforts to emerge in situations where it is not so apparent or has yet to
manifest itself. Sometimes this sensitivity arises paradoxically from losing
wholeness by being broken up and broken open.
This is what happened to Ruth, the author of this amazing book.
When she had her stroke and lost part of her brain function, as she
describes, she became disconnected from her normal human world. The
familiar threads of speech and words with which we ordinarily weave
ourselves together with the world around us became lost to her. She had
to discover new connections, new threads, new ways of weaving. She
had to rediscover how to manifest the innate wholeness of her life and her
connectedness with the rest of creation. She had to demonstrate that while
we might break away from it for one reason or another, the world itself is
never broken; it’s unbrokenness remains for us to rediscover and reengage
in new ways.
Which is exactly what mystics do. They are the artists of wholeness,
the engineers of connectedness. And in particular, they are explorers of the
connections we don’t usually see, the wholeness that is not immediately
apparent but which is there nonetheless under the surface.
When I first met Ruth, I knew I was in the presence of a remarkable
person even before I heard the story of her stroke and her subsequent