A Stirring Thing about Silence

Dear Friends and Family,

Today’s reflections are a little long. I had half a mind to divide this letter in two, but then you would have had half a letter this week and half a letter next! So, I hope you will read when you have a few moments to share in an experience from last year’s trek to the Arctic Ocean and the body’s hunger for sensorial change and the sensory void that births desire as a sacred expression of the eternal. Some wordplay between silence and desire may delight you.

Forthcoming.

In the next two weeks, we’ll inquire into solitude as an expression of inner silence and explore moving into silence. I haven’t decided the order yet.

In the meantime, the solstice will come and go—a seasonal silence for just one day. Wherever you are, summer or winter, I wish you a moment’s greeting of sacred pause.

The next Gathering in Silence is July 7.

Look for an announcement next week about a forthcoming conversation. . . .

Thank you, as always, for being here.

With love,

Renée

---

The slightest susurration lingers in the ear when I am still, the way a snowflake sounds when it drifts toward another. For long, I wondered if I still carry the nearly freezing ocean inside. Maybe I do. But the whisper began before I jumped in. I heard it the first night on the Dalton en route to the Arctic Ocean at Prudhoe Bay.

The Dalton “Highway” is a 412-mile stretch of plowed dirt and gravel over rumples of frost heaves, an enduringly slow, remote passage to the northernmost reach of North America (by road). I reached the start of this passage from Fairbanks around four, then crawled the van some seventy-five miles north before stopping for the night. A wavy fireball of sun hung over the near horizon well past midnight. I had never seen the sun look like the moon.

I stepped outside to stretch my legs and send a spot signal to family back home. I had programmed three signals. One said I’m ok. Another said, I need help and it’s on the way. This signal sent word to the RV insurance company to deploy a towing service. It could take a week or two to reach me, they said. But they promised they would, and in the desert, they had come twice. The third signal was an SOS. I sent the first.

The air smelled of campfire from wildfires hundreds of miles away in Yukon. But there was not a hint of breeze nor the sound of it on leaves. There was no birdsong nor buzz of insects. I heard no rustling in the bush nor the hum of cars or houses or aircraft overhead. I heard nothing.

But nothing does not mean nothing was not there.

In the stillness, there was a distinct hissing sound. I did not know where it came from because it was everywhere, as much within as around me. I turned my head and spun around. Nothing moved. Nothing changed. I had stepped outside and slipped inside a whistling orbit of cosmic psyche on a sun-filled night at the edge of a boreal forest near the top of the world.

You know how when your head spins it starts to hiss? This was like that. Only my head wasn’t spinning. And the world was perfectly still.  

---

Greek mystical texts explain that this hissing or piping sound, this sound of silence, is the sound of creation. It’s the noise made by the stars, by the planets as they coil and spin in their orbits. . . . There are also traditions that say this is what is meant by the harmony of the spheres: the sound Pythagoras once heard in a state of ecstasy, in total stillness.¹

I met a man in Cold Foot—the halfway point on the Dalton and the only place to fuel up. He had come to the Arctic Circle to photograph the caribou run. It happens every summer. Thousands of reindeer trek hundreds of miles inland only to turn around and head straight back as they fatten up for the winter on the flowers of the tundra before the plants are covered again in ice and snow.

He asked if I was traveling alone and what brought me this far north. I asked if he heard the silence. He said, “Yes. It’s very quiet up here. Are you going as far as Atigun Pass? It should be spectacular this time of year, but the road gets muddy out that way. The pass can be slippery.”

“Yes,” I said, “But do you hear the silence.”

He looked at me as if I had not heard a thing he said.

---

An Anatolian Oracle of Apollo, delivered in the form of a poem in one of his temples that was built just above a cave leading down to the underworld . . . explains how after a person comes into contact with the source of this sound then ‘there’s no tearing one’s heart away, because it allows no separation’.²

---

For months after I returned, I could not speak of the Arctic trek. Each telling, and there were only a few tries, I would begin weeping as soon as I started speaking. I still do.

At first, it seemed the tears fell in response to seeing North America’s largest oil field.

Deadhorse Camp at Prudhoe Bay is earth pushed out of the way. It is steel buildings on stilts for when the ice mounds so tall. It is oil flares, the kindest people you’ll ever meet, and empty oil barrels rusting in the Beaufort Sea. The way there is by traveling days across wilds untouched (but for the “road” and pipeline).

And then there is the fact that to get to this end of the earth, I drove those miles on that road beside that pipeline by way of a diesel-fueled engine.

All of this, and I’ve come to understand the weeping as a touch of tender silence to quiet what words too soon spoken could and would do and undo.

---

A stirring thing about silence is that it does not change. Neither does complete darkness. It is not that something is not there. It is that to the body, the absence of sensory stimulation is thievery to sensing endlessly hungry for change. Even the unchanging fact of subtle change stroking the senses strangely manages to put us to sleep to input from the world.

As I write and you read, you and I as sensing bodies sleep. Barely and rarely are we stirred by impressions from the immediate surround stirring our senses: the way light casts shadows this time of day, its tone across a room; the undulating soundscape outside a window; the touch of a breeze on the skin, its aroma. What is the taste of this breeze?

Adaptation to stimulation keeps us from bouncing off the walls from too much input. And yet.  

Waking up the body to impressions we long since dozed off to is a way to wake up as fully human.

All our efforts to turn away from the body to break free of illusion cannot hold a candle to the flesh of you and me to show us what we long to know and be.³ What most wakes our dulled senses is an abrupt change to the endless flux of subtle sensation: a shock from a wowing new sensation or an altogether absence.⁴

Sensory deprivation can drive us mad. What if it can lead us into the heart of the eternal? Might we say that of the former we are terrified and of the latter we yearn?

---

And not to have is the beginning of desire.⁵

---

As much as silence is the unchanging absence of sound, it also dwells in the unseen, which means, silence heightens desire to still ourselves in what is not there.

Notice how still you become—how absolutely still of body—when you hear something and then you do not, trying with your all to hear it again. What was that? is the beginning of coming to our senses.  

And the closer we come to our senses, the more words begin to make sense. And the more words begin to make sense, the more we return to our senses . . . as sacred.

Words, from the beginning, are utterances of the body in direct experience of being. Over time, they become hardened to the dividing lines of rational thought. We can restore their aliveness by sensing into them.

We said last week of the Latin for silence, desinere, that to make sense of the seeming nonsense of from [without] allow, we need to receive silence through the body. What we did not say is that to receive silence, we need to become very still, as when we give our all to what was that?

It is not hard to gather how silence and stillness would go hand in hand, or how silence and darkness would. In these, we come face to face with absence, not as a nothing, but as a quivering aliveness in wait.

If you look and listen to desinere, you might first see and hear desire. The two words are so close it is hard to see them as separate. Whereas desinere for silence signifies allowing for what comes in the absence of sound, the Latin for desire, desiderare, signals that we wait for what the stars will show in the absence of light.⁶

The sound roots that give way to these words were birthed when all was experienced as sacred, when visions and voices came as divine revelation out of darkness and silence, when the body as an expression of desire was not deemed the source of evil or illusion but an immanent expression of what the stars will show.

---

Again and again, we come to desire—not the petty wants for a pair of designer jeans today, a Porsche tomorrow—desire as the inner absence always and everywhere harboring the eternal within and beyond us, the hissing silence that sounds of the ever-expressive creative force breathing us each moment out of an ever-pregnant void.

Desire has dibs on you and me. Dear Friends, look at these two words: void and voice. See that they are of the same something. Can you feel in them the bird giving a love song to the silence of night and so, birthing a new day into being, and you and I giving breathless voice to the void each time we wake to the dark silent gap between and behind all our senses?⁷

In the void, we become hearers and so, bearers, of the eternal.⁸

---

Week 3 of 6-Week Tithe Appeal

We continue our Tithe Appeal, about which I wrote several weeks ago.

If Beyond the Comfort Zone brings you meaning, if these letters linger when you walk away, if they invite you to the yonder edges of who and how you might be, I hope you will consider becoming a paid subscriber in the spirit of the tithe.

Your paid subscription offers encouragement to me and financial support for this publication, which I am so grateful to receive to deepen and expand this offering.

If you wish to upgrade but do not wish to commit for a year, know that there is a monthly option.

And if you wish to upgrade but circumstances do not permit, do reply to this email. I will gladly upgrade you.

---

Gatherings in Silence

The next Gathering in Silence will be July 7.

All are welcome. A paid subscription or donation is appreciated but not required. Register by email: reneeeliphd@substack.com OR reply to this email.

---

---

NOTES

Much of this essay was inspired by reflection upon Peter Kingsley’s most recent book, A Book of Life (London: Catafalque Press, 2021), which returned me to this interview. I found myself contemplating the void behind and beneath and in the gap between the senses, per our series on silence. In A Book of Life, Kingsley reflects on several journeys to Turkey, during which he was guided to the place of burial of Rumi’s beloved Sham of Tabriz by a voice out of the silence, suggestive of Rumi himself; and of many presences in absence.

1. Peter Kingsley, In the Dark Places of Wisdom (Point Reyes, CA: Golden Sufi Center, 1999), p. 130.

2. Ibid., 131

3. I am referring here to traditions East and West that call into question and wrong the ways of being and knowing through embodiment, espousing instead knowing through the rational mind. This tendency gets an obvious start with Plato in the West. But we must not forget that he was influenced by an inclination toward the rational already established. We see it in Buddhism and Abrahamic traditions. It is safe to say this tendency is an expression of the Mental mode of consciousness (Gebser, Ever-Present Origin, cited often here), establishing a footing in what is termed the Axial Age by German philosopher Karl Jaspers, the period roughly between 900 and 300 BCE when the intellectual, philosophical, and religious traditions we know today came to shape human existence in the East and West.

4. P. D. Ouspensky, reflecting on teachings from G. I. Gurdjieff expounds upon this in In Search of the Miraculous: The Teachings of G. I. Gurdjieff – The Classic Exploration of Eastern Religious Thinking and Philosophy (Harcourt, 1949). For an excellent phenomenology that nourishes a praxis of aware embodiment, especially as we are exploring here of sense impressions, see Mme. Jeanne de Salzmann, The Reality of Being: The Fourth Way of Gurdjieff (Boulder: Shambala, 2011)

5. Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, Genesis: The Beginning of Desire (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1995), p. xv, cf. Wallace Stevens, “Notes toward a Supreme Fiction.”

6. C. T. Onions, ed., The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology (Oxford University Press, 1966).

7. Peter Kingsley, “Peter Kingsley Interview” with Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee, Global Oneness Project. Link above accessed June 12, 2024.

8. James Luchte. Pythagoras and the Doctrine of Transmigration: Wandering Souls (London: Continuum, 2009). Amongst the Pythagoreans, the Akousmatikoi were differentiated from the Mathematikoi as the ‘hearers’ of the eternal.