Silence as a way to hear yourself

Dear Readers,

Thanks so much for your response to last week’s “creative meditation” on fermentation and art and your encouragement to post other “essayettes” on the creative life.

Today, I want to reflect on the fullness of emptiness—a subject of long fascination for me. I think most people tend to fill their lives with things, activities, goals, to-do lists, doomscrolling, whatever it might be—and we so rarely seek or trust the empty or silent moments of our lives.

The irony of emptiness, of silence? It teems with surprising activity.

“There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time,” said the composer John Cage. “There is always something to see, something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we cannot.”

It’s in that spirit that I wrote the following creative meditation. To pay attention to the nourishing benefits of silence. To listen to it and see what’s there, for yourself and your story.

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Creative Meditation on Silence

Have we ever lived in a noisier era? We can play nearly any song in the history of the world or watch nearly any movie on our devices. Cars clutter the highways. Even when we try to inhabit the silence of our homes, noises roam and mingle through the sounds of dishwashing machines, heaters, air-conditioning.

People define silence nowadays as putting in their ear buds—shutting out the world with other noises as opposed to breathing in the quiet peace of stillness. In order to make art, though, we must find the space, the quiet, to become intimate with our own minds.

Thomas Merton, the poet and Trappist monk, said that people need silence in their lives to “enable the deep inner voice of their own true self to be heard at least occasionally.” When that voice isn’t heard, he says, we’re essentially exiled from our home.

The noises of our lives become the equivalent of a locked door, blocking us from the shelter of our lives within. Silence is not just an absence of sound, but an awareness of an inner stillness that attunes the mind’s ear to what would otherwise remain hidden.

“Take a walk at night, and walk so silently that the bottoms of your feet become ears.” Pauline Oliveros advised.

Silence is a cleansing of one’s thoughts, an invitation for your inner life to walk about and perhaps even dance.

Sit with silence, enshrine yourself in it, and if you listen closely, the world within you suddenly becomes a chorus, and the words of a story are born.

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Because quotes

“Silence is all the sound of contemplation, the most available and most neglected resource we have.”

—Nikki Giovanni

“The quieter you become, the more you can hear.”

—Ram Dass

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