Further Reflections on Silence
Dear Friends and Family,
Last Sunday, a small group of us from across North America gathered on Zoom. One by one each person appeared—without words. As the screen filled, the silence grew and expanded each of us into it. But for the few words I spoke to orient us to the hour ahead, the silence went unbroken. It was an extraordinary hour, a few technology details to be remedied notwithstanding, and I thank you who joined in silence.
That gathering and a few recent comments inspired me to share reflections on silence today. I am intentionally brief, leaving openings. . . .
Ever in gratitude and with love,
Renée
If we say silence is the absence of sound—and most of us would—what do we say of two musical notes and the beat between them?
If I take a walk in a park, alone, and my mind is racing, and I come across a cacophony of birdsong, who is silent?
If sound pulses waves across what we call air, where does silence dwell?
If we say silence has sound, what do we say of dark and light, absence and presence?
Attempting to wind words around silence is paradox. To write silence onto the page is, at every turn, to come upon the silence that cannot be spoken. But I hazard the effort, sensing that if we wander around silence, the word, we might come to silence, the phenomenon, as not only an experience. We come to silence as a mystery that invokes us as it broadens and deepens our perception of being.
The Latin word for silence, desinere, means stop. With this, we would say, silence is the cessation of sound. But words are never as simple as they seem.
In Latin, the prefix de tells us something comes from something or somewhere; sinere tells us something allows something. And hiding in plain sight in the middle of it all is the word sine, which means without.
If we say silence signifies from [without] allows, you and I could twist and turn thought around and through this seeming nonsense and try endlessly to explain. Or we could come to silence through the body itself and immediately understand. Open the hand. Drop the jaw just a little. Let the belly receive the next breath. And make each atom of our being an ear. We receive silence.
. . .
In the hour or so before dawn, there comes a moment when the dark night is broken—not by light. Bird by bird, the day wakes with song, each tone so birthed from silence that when the mind, still blurry with sleep, wakes to this blossoming serenade, the body wakes to the day in an entirely shared circadian way.
Whereas the entire soundscape moments before the first song seemed absent all dimension, it is now beyond dimension. There is no horizontal, vertical, or transverse plane here. No time in the sound bath of birds singing. There is only the infinite silence giving sound to the waking call between them and their love notes washed into the silence again like the sea onto shore.
It is not light that gives birth to a day. It is the emergence of sound from its primordial absence.
Lean into that absence as we might our own shadow and you and I come to a silence like no other. We are most afraid of this silence, around which we need a solid backbone to stand sturdy in this world. Come a little closer, without force, and so soon, so tenderly, the absence in this silence reveals a presence as close as the breath itself, and here, the living understanding that the primordial silence beyond is the perpetual silence within.1
It is not that silence is vacuous. It is that its vastness is so immediate and so remembered that it takes our breath away. We need not be afraid of the silence we run from.
. . .
We could say this of silence and give our lives over to its tacit exploration—each reflection a phenomenological (the lived study of a phenomenon) contemplation:
Sound is a portal to silence.
Absence of sound is the sound of silence.
In sound’s absence is the vastness of silence.
In the vastness of silence is its presence everywhere.
In its presence everywhere is its mystery within us.
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Gatherings in Silence
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NOTES
Today’s reflections, while phenomenological, are influenced by study of Robert Sardello on the mystery and presence of silence, and on presencing the presence of silence, in Silence: The Mystery of Wholeness (Berkeley, North Atlantic Books: 2008) which I cannot recommend highly enough for the interested reader; Valentin Tomberg on the perpetual silence within, namely “Letter 1: The Magician,” in Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey into Christian Hermeticism, trans. Robert Powell (Jeremy P. Tarcher, 1985); Peter Kingsley on presencing silence in hesychastic stillness, in Dark Places of Wisdom (Point Reyes, CA: Golden Sufi Center, 1999); A Story Waiting to Pierce You (Golden Sufi Center, 2010); A Book of Life (London, Catafalque Press, 2021); William Segal’s reflections on silence through his work with esotericist philosopher and mystic G. I. Gurdjieff and The Work, in Opening: Collected Writings 1985–1987 (New York: Noah’s Ark Publishing, 1999); The Voice at the Borders of Silence (New York: Overlook Press, 2003).
Other works to explore quieting daily life as a portal to silence: John O’Donohue, Eternal Echoes: Celtic Reflections on Our Yearning to Belong ( Harper Perennial, 2000 ); Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom (Harper Perennial, 2004); Thich Nhat Hanh, Silence: The Power of Quiet in a World Full of Noise (HarperOne, 2016).
Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel had a beautiful song called The Sound of Silence which was a catalyst that started opening my mind to exploration. For nearly sixty years.
Reading the Latin word desinere, the word for silence or stop, my mind saw desire. This is not a trick of the eye but my heartfelt longing to walk through the world in this way. At this stage of my life I am pulling on the threads of my cultural and familial conditioning and desinere is taking a back seat, yet I feel its yearning. Thank you for this series Renee.