Monday, May 16, 2022

David Whyte

Silence

is not stillness, but tidal and seasonal movement left to itself.

Silence does not end skepticism but makes it irrelevant.

Belief or unbelief or any previously rehearsed story meets the wind in the trees, the distant sound of falling water, or the watching eye and listening ear of a puzzled loved one.

To become deeply silent is not to become still, but to become tidal and seasonal, a coming and going that has its own inimitable, essential character, a story not fully told, like the background of the sea, or the rain falling or the river going on, out of sight, out of our lives.

Reality met on its own terms demands absolute presence, and absolute giving away, an ability to live on equal terms with the fleeting and the eternal, the hardly touchable and the fully possible, a full bodily appearance and disappearance, a rested giving in and giving up; another identity braver more generous; more silent and more here than the one looking hungrily for an easy, unearned answer.

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‘SILENCE’

From CONSOLATIONS: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words.Revised Edition © David Whyte and Many Rivers Press 2020