How Shall We Live Our Lives:

Silence

by Francis Weller

How shall we live our lives in these changing and challenging times? This question is present in many of our hearts. We are between worlds; the unsustainable world of unrestrained consumption and empire, and the return to a sustainable world of small scale living that depends more intimately on the land upon which we live. There are many ways to respond to this question. Some require altering the ways we move through our day to day lives: changing our patterns of energy use, driving habits, recycling, buying locally grown foods, and using green building materials to name a few. Though all noble and necessary, these efforts, as well as legislative or policy approaches, speak primarily to the surface of the issues we face as a culture and a planet. These responses will merely slow the damage being done, not stop the hemorrhaging of nature or the collapse of our communities.

To do this, we must look more deeply into what the question is truly asking of us. How shall we live our lives in these times? What lies beneath this core question is another and more soul-centered concern: How do we become native to this land and live within the folds of her skin in a respectful and enduring way? Our response to the question must include pathways that access the wisdom of our indigenous souls. 

Over the next 10 months I will be addressing this question with a series of articles exploring what I call the root practices of the indigenous soul. Collectively, these practices comprise a medicine chest of remedies that offer healing to us individually and to our local cultures. They are ways of opening to the deeper patterns inherent in life that help us resist the pull towards what Daniel Quinn calls  “The Great Forgetting” that is fostered by the ways we are conditioned to live in this culture. 

By working with these root practices we may find our way back to the sacred earth. The ten root practices are: silence, beauty, embodiment, initiation, place, community, creativity, grief, imagination and gratitude. We begin with silence.

Silence

To begin with the root practice of silence is to acknowledge its central role in the shaping of our original natures. Before language, before the rise of the machine, silence was abundant. Our deep time ancestors knew a silence that few of us have access to today. Imagine for a moment, a world completely devoid of mechanical sounds, no highway noise, no airplanes overhead, no buzz of computers, or the white noise hum of the refrigerator; nothing but wind, birdsong, crickets, and at times, complete and utter stillness. The internal world of mind was quieter as well for these ancestors as the flow of internal thought was not co-opted by the continuous monologue informed by language. What we take for granted in our modern world is an entirely new terrain for our souls, one with deep implications for our psychic and physical well being.

Our ancestors had to be fluent in the language of silence to survive. Finding water, tracking game and weather patterns, the movements of predators, all required an attention acutely attuned to the world. Gary Snyder suggests that silence was the original meditation, the deep attunement between self and world. This was a state of openness in which the boundary between self and other remained fluid and soft.

Our modern world is inundated with noise, a cacophony of manmade sounds that insult the soul with its harshness. Our response to this intrusiveness is to recoil and withdraw from the world. Noise hems us in, closes off the world around us and shrinks the horizon as the senses contract. I know I have felt those sensations countless times as sirens, the drone of traffic, or as the soul jarring sounds of jackhammers slam over me. Social critic John Zerzan writes, “Civilization is a conspiracy of noise, designed to cover up the uncomfortable silences.” The overlay of the machine world and the chronic presence of manufactured sounds and vistas have depleted the rich world of soul. Each contraction we make pulls us further away from the animate earth. Zerzan adds, “Silence, like darkness, is hard to come by; but mind and spirit need its sustenance.”

The soul requires regular intervals of silence, spaces that offer stillness and a quiet that remind us of our deeper relations with a wider world. Silence offers us a wordless place, a spaciousness that invites intimacy with the surrounding world when the sound of our own voice falls away. (Silence: From the Latin, silere, to say nothing.) The practice of silence is one of humility where we make room for other intelligences, other ways of knowing, other styles of being embodied in the lives of the animals, plants, stones and stars. In this way, we acknowledge that the other voices of this world are worth attending to. Indigenous peoples everywhere have long acknowledged the multiple forms of knowing that exist in the world and have honored them in their stories, dances and rituals. Accessing this wisdom required an open and available heart, one made permeable through the practice of silence.

In the absence of silence, we make life and nature a mirror of our own image, reflecting our perceptions and expectations of how things should be. In silence, on the other hand, is a willingness to listen to how things are; the actual shape of the world, its moods and rhythms.

Buddhist meditation teacher and writer Christina Feldman reminds us that we are also “humbled by silence as we discover that our words can never fully describe the fullness and richness of any moment in our life that is truly listened to.” Feldman’s phrase is an inducement to slow down adequately to truly listen and to let the fullness of the moment open up and be experienced as revelation. “Silence does not develop or increase in time, but time increases in silence. It is as though time had been sown into silence, as though silence had absorbed it; as though silence were the soil in which time grows to fullness”.

Silence introduces us to an unshaped place, not planned or designed by the mind. It is a wild place, unpredictable, unknown, not yet revealed. It is a place of uncertainty. That is in part why we fear silence. We often feel the need to be in control, to be able to predict every outcome. Silence offers no such guarantees. In fact, silence takes us to the farthest edges of our life and the edge where we meet the world open and vulnerable. No matter which direction we move, towards the great unknown depths of our internal life, or into the unknown expanses of the world, we are entering the wild. This is where life is, where it emerges and has the potential to reshape our lives. Silence is midwife to our unlived and longed for lives. Silence is pregnant. Silence asks us to birth what is new, what is erupting from the depths of our soul.

It is a state of alertness, an attention offered to our internal and external world. This place of attentiveness enables us to enter the thought of the world and by so doing we are informed by a source of being larger and more inclusive than our individual self can define. It places us back into the mystery, back into the source of being and as such, silence becomes a place of discovering the vast and breathing reality behind our thoughts. Audio ecologist Gordon Hempton simply states, “Listening is worship.” Silence is reverence.

On those occasions when I have felt lost and troubled, I have gone to places in nature where I was able to come into a full and present silence, one that enveloped me and opened me to the larger reality underlying the observable world. On one occasion I found a space that opened into the earth. I stepped into that world and in the deep silence that I felt there, I found myself returning to myself, to the center of my being. Thoughts feel like they echo in these places, sounding hollow and falling short of what is needed. Letting go of the thoughts and allowing the presence of this place enter me was the medicine I required. The silence of this place was restorative and renewing. The practice of silence is healing. The Persian poet Rumi reminds us,

            You are a song, a wished for song.
            Go through the ear to the center…
                        where wind is, where sky,
                        where silent knowing.
            Put seeds.
                        Cover them.
            Blades will sprout
                        Where you do your work.

Silence is its own speech as evidenced by the wordless embrace of lovers, the gasp that erupts when overtaken by beauty. There are no words; only in silence can we comprehend these times, allowing the moment to penetrate us and touch us. Silence in this sense, is erotic, drawing us into the body in a tangible way – receptive, open, attuned to the spaces around us. Silence elegantly engages with all that surrounds us. It is silence that allows the immediacy of contact; no intervening words, no separation between us and the moment.

While we primarily associate silence with sound, there is a silence for each of our senses. It is important that we attend to all of our senses and discover what form of silence most entreats it to live fully in the world. If we fail to do this, there will be a withering, a withdrawing of that sense from fully being present for us. For example, our eyes digest an enormous amount of information every day – much of it difficult and painful. We watch endless hours of television, stare blankly at computer screens, often as a requirement of our employment, we scan billboards and menus, newspapers, and neon signs telling us that everything is OPEN for business. Our eyes grow weary from the amount of work they have to do every day taking in the modern world. We often get home at night and rub our eyes; we look at them in the mirror and we see the exhaustion.

What would silent eyes look like? Rather than a vista of data to be assimilated, what the eyes long for is an open space of beauty and texture. The eyes delight in a sea of wildflowers, night skies far from the ambient light of the city, distances that invite awe. That is the silence we require; no manmade intrusions, no light from the 24 hour a day street lights or car lights staring us down as we drive at night. We long for stars and sunsets that give our eyes rest.

I remember standing with my head tilted back, looking up towards the night sky in Africa amazed at the density of the heavens. The sky was immense and I found myself, in Rumi’s words, “falling up into the bowl of the sky.” That is the silence we seek for the eyes, a silence that soothes, a silence that beckons us to touch the world and find our way into life. As Diane Ackerman says, “How sense-luscious the world is.” We must recover a silence that speaks to each of our senses: A silence of taste, of touch, of our sense of smell. Each of these rivers of the body opens an ancient gateway to the soul.

An Uncomfortable Silence

Why is silence uncomfortable? We often become ill at ease at times when silence arises spontaneously. We call it an “awkward silence” when we are talking with others and suddenly no one is speaking. We look around and wonder who will rescue the moment and save us from the tension in the air. We have an expectation that every moment should be filled with words. It is not the silence however, that is awkward. It is we who are no longer familiar with its terrain and have as such become clumsy in those moments when they arise.

We are a culture that has not encouraged a relationship with stillness, with listening, with quiet. We are a hyperactive culture and fill our days with noise and continual motion. Rarely do we find ourselves in a place that fosters silence and as a consequence, we do not know the territory. Silence also brings us closer to the deep well of grief and emptiness that most of us carry internally. We stay in constant motion in order to stay disconnected from this truth, making the approach of silence threatening. I have heard this fear from many of those that I work with in my practice. Another source of discomfort is our fear of being silenced by powers and structures that would banish us into exile. This fear is often internalized and we learn to accommodate ironically by silencing ourselves. And finally, silence reminds us of the deep silence that is always nearby, the silence of death. As Goethe wrote in 1780

Over the hilltops
Silence,
Among the treetops
You feel hardly
A breath moving.
The birds fall silent in the woods.
Simply wait! Soon
You too will be silent.

The Practice of Silence

Go out into the world and notice the sounds that draw your attention. Notice if they pull you towards the source of the sound, or do they push you away. Keep walking deeper into the world. Find a place of quiet, such as a woods, or the ocean. Silence again, is not the absence of sound, but the ability to quiet our own state in order to enter the larger world awaiting us. Let yourself fall into the space that surrounds you and attend to the voices that are present. See who is speaking, whose language you are being asked to notice.

Solitude is another practice of silence. I am a strong advocate of community. We need to know we are held within the greater circle of hands and hearts. At the same time, we have a fundamental need for solitude. Honoring silence fulfills the soul’s need for interludes in our conversations with others. In the presence of silence, we are gifted with the grace of our aloneness, times alone when we are able to drop any vestige of performance and simply be. I have come to treasure my hours alone. They are a touchstone guiding me towards my soul’s deepest desires for my life. Here, in these places of solitude, the imagination is granted a free and unencumbered space to express its native voice. David Whyte writes in his poem Ten Years Later, “one small thing // I've learned these years, //how to be alone, //and at the edge of aloneness //how to be found by the world.”

Create a daily practice of honoring silence, whether through a meditation practice or a walk into the woods, along a creek bank, holding a quiet space with a friend, or simply at home. Each of these pathways can lead to the revelations available to the silent mind. Take time to notice and then write about your discoveries. See what knowing gathers through the hours of your listening.

The Tao Te Ching opens with the lines, “The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.” The more I sit in silence, the more I appreciate its profound effect on my being. Relying less and less on words to convey meaning, I find myself resting in a place of soft attention. Silence is often imagined as a passive and empty space. Rather than an absence, silence is a profound fullness that nourishes us and reminds us of what we long for – a spaciousness that surrounds us and enfolds us in a sacred embrace.