I feel the real medium for me is silence, so I could be writing in any language. To inflect the inner silence, to give it body, that’s all we’re doing. You use the voice to make the silence present. The real subject in poetry isn’t the voice. The real subject is silence.
Li Young Lee, The Subject is Silence
Best of any song
is bird song
in the quiet, but first
you must have the quiet
‘1997, I’ Sabbath Poems, Wendell Berry
The trees, the flowers, the plants grow in silence.
The stars, the sun, the moon move in silence.
Silence gives us a new perspective.
Mother Teresa
Making room for silence in a world full of human-centred, human-manufactured noise – talking, sirens, phone calls, television, cars, machinery – isn’t easy. Even when I deliberately strip away the noise that I bring into my home through the radio or computer, I am still able to hear the noise that others make penetrating my walls – the baby crying next door, the dog barking over the fence, the reversing sounds of the supermarket delivery van. I try to remember to use the sounds as bouncing of points for momentary prayers. ‘Lord be with all those involved in this emergency’ is perhaps the most basic and oft repeated, given how main sirens seem to penetrate my quiet, but it is an attempt to bless both the emergency-responders as well as the emergencee and their friends, family or carers, as well as the Police or health workers who might be involved further down the line. When I can sometimes feel overwhelmed by the needs of the world, such ‘noise’ prayers are a good way of re-grounding myself in specifics. It’s like praying along with the radio news bulletin, which is another thing I try to remember to do.
Focussing on the gaps in between the noise of my life helps me make room to realise how noisy my head is, how vocal my internal commentators, how my ‘monkey mind’ as Richard Rohr calls it, is full of frippery jumping from subject to subject. Making room to quiet my thoughts is how I try to begin each day. Having practised Thomas Keating’s Centering Prayer for the last ten years, there are some days when I am able to fall through my noisy thoughts to reach the vastness of real silence for a few seconds.
Here is where the Holy abides within.
Here is where the Holy waits for me to stop long enough so I might have an encounter with the infinite Now.
Here is where I can put myself and my agenda aside and get curious about what the God-With-Us might want of me this day.
The Center for Courage and Renewal, the organization that Parker Palmer co-founded, has what they call a “touchstone,” which basically means a guideline or agreement for a group: “No fixing, saving, advising, or correcting each other.” The first time I read it, it sort of took my breath away. So much of our time is spent listening to other people in a doggedly goal-oriented way. Underneath our listening, we’re asking ourselves: What can I pluck from what this person is saying that I identify with? What confirms my worldview? What gives me an opportunity to offer advice or a response that will showcase my own intelligence or a chance to share an experience about my life?
I don’t mean to make that kind of listening sound shallow or manipulative. Ultimately, it’s with great intention that we listen like that. We crave to connect. We crave to be seen. We crave to comfort. It’s a very useful kind of listening. It helps us create new nodes, get things done, coalesce within communities.
But there is another kind of listening, a listening that we neglect at our own peril, that is not about getting some particular place, but simply about witnessing another human being. This kind of listening is long and open-ended. It’s patient. It’s curious. It’s not calculating. This kind of listening operates on only one level — the words coming out, the way they hit the ear, the shaping of a story, a sadness, a yearning, a wish.
… It’s an overlooked kind of love, a way we stay sane. It happens in the cracks, under the radar, just between two people. And it doesn’t happen enough.
Courtney E. Martin, ‘Listening in the Cracks’
listening in the cracks. (iPhone image)
image into ikon 