a couple of quotes from the author of the Cloud of Unknowing

[Gabrielle Dean]

Let that meek (quiet) darkness be your whole mind and like a mirror to
you. For I want your thought of self to be as naked and simple as your
thought of God, so that you may be with God in spirit without
fragmentation and scattering of your mind.

Mary models the way of contemplative prayer. So she hung her love and
her longing desire in this cloud of unknowing, and learned to love what
she could not see clearly in this life by the light of understanding in
her reason, 


The Cloud of Forgetting
And if ever you come to this cloud, and make a home there and take up
the work of love as I urge you, there is something else you must do as
this cloud is above you, and between you and your God, you must put a
cloud of forgetting beneath you, between you and all the creatures that
have ever been made. 
The cloud of unknowing will perhaps leave you with a feeling that you
are far from God. But I assure you, if it is authentic, only the
absence of a cloud of forgetting between you and all creatures keeps
you from God. 5 421-427.