Cherishing Sounds of Silence

We spend our years like rivers in flood,

shouldering uprooted trees,

dragging bright debris through canyoned days,

each opinion a hawk's cry circling above the marketplace.

Meanwhile…

Silence waits, not empty,

but patient as moonlight caught in deep snow,

a white fox standing motionless at the edge of a forest

we are always too busy to enter.

At last the clamor begins to molt from us.

The old urgencies fall away like rusted armor dropping from a forgotten knight

into grass already reclaiming its name.

Stillness arrives grain by grain,

a desert dune remade by invisible winds,

until the heart becomes an illumination beneath clear water,

its small flame no longer fighting the current,

its glow reaching farther because it need not move.

And sometimes…

Waking in the middle of the night,

there comes those rare coming-alive hours when every appliance,

every traffic whisper,

every human demand has vanished beyond the horizon.

The darkness hangs vast as an uncharted sea,

and silence settles over the room like velvet laid across the stars.

And there is, too, the sound of silence,
not absence but presence,
like snowfall filling a midnight meadow
without a single visible hand.
It hums beneath hearing,
a silver thread stitched through darkness,
the ocean inside a seashell after the tide has gone.
It is the language of stars,
spoken across impossible distances,
a music without notes
that somehow teaches the soul
how to listen and hear…

For a breath,

for several breaths,

a feeling like a glimpse through a half-open gate,

a taste of what passing on might be:

no noise,

no distractions,

only the immeasurable realm

where sound leaves behind its body

and becomes a silent echo,

endlessly mesmerizing in the dark.