There is a voice that doesn’t use words. Listen. ~ Rumi
Looking out my window this morning, I realize that while the weather here on California’s coast is amenable, a stiffening cold has settled in across a great portion of the nation. Hundreds of thousands are without power in the US, and more snow is on its way in the next few days. Winter is still very much with us, and for many people in many ways it seems winter has been going on for a long time.
A season for slowing down or even stopping, winter, while it may sometimes be bleak and difficult, can also be a space for going inward–for listening to the silence and for noticing what touches the heart and waits there to be noticed. The natural world is imbued with silence–snow’s heavy quilt in winter, a desert’s dunes, the forest world, vegetables growing in a garden with clouds floating through, rocks strewn along a pathway–the very earth itself. Everything that exists rises out of a space of silence. “Silence is not the absence of something but the presence of everything…silence, like the art of sculpture, is the removal of excess material so that the true form — of one’s consciousness, of the world, of life itself — can be revealed,” states Gordon Hampton whose work has been to record the earth’s most silent spaces. Maybe this very absence of continuous movement, our being stopped in our tracks, so to speak, is calling us to a place of deeper presence, the stillness itself an opportunity for greater awareness.
We’re living in a period of reduced movement as a result of the pandemic. Fewer of us fly across the world and many of may be driving less often as well. While working at home, it may be that I don’t speak aloud for hours as I read, write or do chores. Outside the window birds flutter at the feeder. At night the tongues of stars speak with a silent, silvered light. All can seem quiet on the surface, nevertheless, I notice that it’s not necessarily true that lack of speech means I’ve entered through a door of silence. My mind likes to jump restlessly from thought to thought as if on a pogo stick. Sometimes I have to go for a walk just to grow quiet. To be fully quiet, to hold one’s entire mind, heart, and body open as if it were a listening ear is challenging. Pablo Neruda in his poem, “Keeping Quiet” writes,
If we were not so single-minded
about keeping our lives moving,
and for once could do nothing,
perhaps a huge silence
might interrupt this sadness
of never understanding ourselves
and of threatening ourselves with death.
Perhaps the earth can teach us
as when everything seems dead
and later proves to be alive.
During winter things beneath layers of cold or snow can seem dead, but much is going on inside the earth. Inner life is connected to external life. Making plans and setting goals, these are valuable activities but as Neruda suggests, the earth can be our teacher. Ongoing and endless production and activity isn’t necessarily life-giving in the end. Eventually, resources run out. What rests beneath the surface of all our action rises to our awareness because we have finally stopped moving enough to notice it. Silence is integral to growth and shifts of consciousness and understanding. When the huge silence arises, Neruda suggests, we can turn to the earth to teach us how to move out of ourselves into a place of greater connection to life. Like the seasons rotating through the year, we too can create seasons of quiet, letting the leaves from branches of activity drop long enough to allow a quietness to enter and renewal to occur.
Sitting on my front porch in the morning, I hold my cup of tea and quietly observe the day for twenty minutes. This morning while sitting in the coolness, I noticed small buds beginning to appear on the buckeye tree, the rich, the illuminated green of chard and pineapple sage poking up from the garden beds, the nuthatches, chickadees and California scrub jays fluttering at the bird feeder, a gray squirrel scrambling up the pine trunk, thin clouds scudding through overhead. With this gentle entrance to the day, I’m reminded of my connection to a world wider than my concerns or the list of things I might want to accomplish.
The natural world is nonjudgemental, and as a result, nourishing. It can carry us into the place of embodied silence. Larry Ward, in his book, America’s Racial Karma, describes actions that reground the body and “reset the nervous system.” Some of these are looking around the space wherever you are and paying specific attention to what you observe, giving attention to the sounds around you, naming colors you see, and noticing your skin temperature. Ward also suggests purposefully greeting the day by going to a chosen spot out of doors where you feel the earth beneath your feet and the sun on your skin, then doing a slow 360-degree turn, noticing what you feel while listening quietly to the sounds in the world around you. Silence creates a pause in action, a gap inside which we can reground ourselves and grow more aware. These practices can help the mind and body calm and come more readily into stillness so we can enjoy the silence.
Daniel J. O’Leary in Year of the Heart writes, “To learn how to wait, how to be silent, how to befriend the dark…Thus do we prepare to be creative. There is a waiting, a silence and a darkness in all birthing. Heart’s winter is already a filling womb.” Out of silence and stillness a different kind of conversation with life has the possibility of emerging. While waiting for spring to arrive, we can hold a space each day for silence, observing the world with open eyes, listening to the world around us with the ears of our hearts. Entering into a place of silence we can slowly discover a new way of being in the world.
Anna Citrino---Poetry, Place, Pilgrimage 