Can you count the different types of silence?
Such a futile exercise proves useful – once.
For the lesson it delivers is that there are more types of silence than all the raindrops in a monsoon torrent.
The warm silky sheen of a tropical downpour.
The hearty rhythmic rinse of a British upland April shower.
In the end, counting is a game that detracts from the opportunity of learning to experience the umbilical essence of this ephemeral treat.
This inverted beat.
Can you intuit the moon-washed textures of silence that slide softly up against the edges of daily life?
Sudden as reflex or announced like thunder.
Nuanced as sunsets. Stealthy as cats.
What is the shape of the space we call wonder?
Perhaps you have been swimming her deep-lock waters for years without knowing.
Can you come to know her, then?
Can you bow to the qualities of her unending benevolence or follow the arc of her poetry, curvaceous and bountiful?
What will it take to build a deep-seated, lifelong, loving relationship with this wise old maker of heart-music?
Eternal yet fleeting. Constant yet coy.
Is silence tame or wild?
When she calls to you in a voice beyond sound, in a language beyond words, how do you feel?
She cannot be glimpsed.
She won’t form herself into handy packets that can be marketed, exchanged, stored and played, conjured, summoned, paused and rewound for the convenience of this modern world.
This hedonic form-addicted shopping cart, stacked up and hurled.
Her infinite truth is not for sale to the highest bidder in the markets of this manifest illusion.
She’s not cheap like trophies.
She’s expensive as water.
Life is her offspring. The emptiness, her daughter.
Does silence exist behind noise?
Patiently waiting for you to put down your toys?
And when you do let her in.
When you kneel, hands-cupped at her shores, tapping her cool reserve, how does she instruct?
What is her value?
What dish has she cooked?
How do you sing a song of silence?
What is the currency of intuition?
What does peace sound like to you?
Walk away from noise to meet the gentle hold of ceasefires, the wrap-around warmth of trust, the soldier-blue skies of hope and the plump, silhouette covers of replenishing sleep.
Are we even fit to speak of her?
Isn’t the very contemplation of silence a schoolboy error?
A clumsy trespass. A naive annihilation.
Can the cacophony of thought and our spoken language deliver us into her arms – a map pointing to the treasure marked X?
Or are we bound, this way, to be cast farther out from the exalted gardens of her veiled emporium?
Her rivers of wisdom. Her timeless sugar-spun fields.
Are we chasing rainbows now?
What is prayer but listening for her and listening to her?
Drinking deep and often from the well of her shimmering golden instruction.
Rejoicing in her simplicity. Submitting to her induction.
Silent is listen rearranged.
How can it be that, in this knowledge economy, in our fervent addiction to our version of education, we have forgotten to ask for her Princess teachings?
Haven’t you noticed how nobody speaks of remarkable things?
Of valour and fraternity?
Of the comfort of doubt and the strength of vulnerability and the glory of mystery.
The signal truth of dreams. The opulent bedrock of intuition.
The freedom of loss. The honour of sickness.
The goodness of failure. The gift of pain.
The joy of death.
The satiety of the void. The wholeness of space.
The complete rounded finish of imperfection.
Of meaning and purpose and the wide-smile wink of the unknown.
Of questions that demand to remain gracefully unanswered.
The unharvested sewn.
Why do cells divide?
Haven’t you noticed what she has taken back?
Naked and steeped in self, we hide.
How come you’re so busy thinking yet you never think of her?
Are you too young for her age? Are you too clever for her sagacity?
Too cynical for her mage? Too abundant for her capacity?
Silence is not quietness.
You don’t get to get her merely by behaving like a scolded child.
Our ancient blue planet groans in her tongues as it spins.
The vibration-hum of its energy field falls on the deaf ears of weary encumbered souls.
We are too busy. We are elsewhere.
Our feet near the soil but our minds on distant futures mapped out in targets and goals.
The tomorrow years.
Our tunnel-track-desires we call ambition and wear as gloves.
Appetites we call hunger. Pleasures we call happiness.
Needs we call loves.
Have we not grown too important, too engrossed, too indulgent, too masterful to offer up the only thing she asks of us – the humility of reverence?
She’s not in the mirrors. Devoid of resemblance.
Silence laughs loudest.
Our noise could be her vengeance.
Yet she won’t forsake those who beckon her entrance.
