SILENCE

Still Life

Velvet
Smooth

Fecund
Dark

Clamorous
Lost domain

Still
Waiting

Still
Ceaseless

Rich thick with
gifts and
gods and
ghouls

Spacious
Mortifying
Edifying
Emptiness

Silence

Sit.
Till.
This fertile soil

I can make a great deal of noise without opening my mouth. Any old argument will do. Add a dash of regret, rehearse the conversation, and I might actually win this time. I might even be understood. The room can be deathly quiet while I am busy defending myself to someone who isn’t there.

Silence thus becomes difficult when I arrive expecting peace. More likely, though, desire, irritation and grief are waiting for this precise, less crowded moment. Something beautiful may appear too, although it has no obligation to arrive first. The wish to be calm can become another impatience, another way of deciding what I am prepared to encounter, another way of deciding that I am not good enough. I can’t even sit still.

Then there is the urge to interpret, the need to know. A feeling needs a cause, an image needs a name, and soon I’m busy explaining what has barely had time to arrive. I wonder how much still gets lost in that hurry. I can attend to a thought without granting it authority. A familiar old thought, an old pattern of thinking, can sound convincing simply because I have rehearsed it and heard it so many times before.

There is a judgement in cultivation about when to work the ground and when to leave it alone. Attention includes both. Inwardly, I can keep turning an experience over until I have worn a groove through it, and then I’m likely to mistake the amount of time I spend thinking about it for the care that I give it.

So even silence becomes a project: allocate twenty minutes, sit, achieve stillness, re-emerge clearer, kinder, more effective. Is it true? Sometimes. And yet my withdrawal from doing must somehow deliver an improvement. Even silence is expected to earn its keep.

I would like to leave the question of yield open a little longer. I’d like to sit with something before deciding what it means, or what needs changing, or what might grow. Sure, there may be work to do, but also there might be something happening that my interference keeps interrupting.

What is it that I am disturbing because I cannot bear to wait?