It is something I've always believe that words use up our store of silence. That the quiet within us, the quiet that is nurtured, allowed to fill us with the blue-grey lull of reverie is what allows for the creative flame to flash out with it's pleasing heat. We want that fire, we want it all the time, in our addiction-driven society we tend to want all pleasures all the time, as much as we can get them. We forget about how hunger is the seat of all our enjoyment of nourishment, how pain was the parent of love and pitiless fate the mother of mercy. And as such we forget how the silence gave birth to words.
We are comfortable with words in our world, we bandy them around ceaselessly, endless reproducing them and we wonder that their beauty and potency begins to dry up. We burn ourselves out wanting to make them constantly and we soon become bored when their flow ceases. But when I was away from this screen and away from human society, either in the trackless wood or the far more trackless outreaches of my mind I have seen a lady. She only passed me on the road but her eyes were pools of silence to drown in, in which coalesce all the things we call loneliness, and shadow, and potential. She is always passing me, known but for shorts spaces between breaths before the noise and chaos of my pulse-pounding humanity wakes me and stirs me from her society. Though She never truly goes anywhere. She has brought me two great gifts, one looked like a piece of worthless black coal, the blackened product of the long dead past, the other like a dagger sure to rend my heart. The first was what I might have called loss, and the knowledge of things passing, the presence of yesterday that cannot be cancelled from human reckonings of things. The second was love, as sharp and swift as the talons of a bird of prey. And at times when I hold her gifts close to me and try not to mind their cold sharpness I find that for a moment I can speak from silence. Just for a second, on the road of life, passing Her, an atom among the spectacle of creation glows for an instant and then appears to go out.
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3 comments:
A powerful experience;certainly powerfully expressed from the spaces between the words, where the meanings are.
Thank you for sharing this intensely personal encounter with us. Though, however personal such experiences must be for each of us, it is where we all of us have our being.
I had a great time reading your wonderfully eclectic blog. All this and you're a fan of single malt as well. Ardbeg is my current favorite. Yuck, it tastes like dirt, says my husband. Yes, I know, I say, and isn't it wonderful?
And so I come to leave a comment and see Heron here, whose writing I also enjoy.
And more to the point, I want to agree with this post: our culture's frantic sucking of stimulation in all forms leads paradoxically and sadly to a terrible emptiness. But when we sit still, even for a few minutes, our emptiness is filled.
Best to you,
Puny
http://www.thenewanimist.blogspot.com
Thank you so much both of you for your thoughtful comments. Heron- I always enjoy and appreciate having your input here at my blog, it is always wonderful, and rare, to find other who appreciate the meanings between words as well as in them.
Puny human- I'm glad you enjoyed my work, I hope you will return. I am with you, the 'dirt' taste is part of the appeal, like earth and fire together in water, a magical liquid.
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