rattle and hum.....

I feel like I'm falling
Like I'm spinning on a wheel
It always stops beside me
With a presence I can feel.
U2, God Part II

Silence is not the quiet around you. That kind can be the most jarring of all noises. It's potentially penetrating turbulence warbles in scratchy reverberations, filling any form of sanctuary with the sounds of.........

Someone you long to hear from sitting loudly in their invisibility. Their elected muteness speaks volumes and leaves vibrations of doubt ringing in your ears...

Someone you want to converse with about big things but they avoid connecting, preferring to fill the airwaves with chatter rather than what matters. Their aversions seem like mocking talking.

Worries and lots of them, which have choked your own thinking until the inside of your brain pulses its own anxious heartbeat... pathump, pathump, pathump. We'll call this 4 am unsilence.

Too many items on the never ending "to do" list that nag and nag while you attempt to take deep breaths to figure out when and if they can be done.....and HOW

Even in your sleep, silence cranks through aggravating dreams where discord dukes it out.

You can turn off the music, the outside traffic, the howling dog in need of attention. You can flip a switch on the hum of the kitchen appliances, ignore the snoring, close the windows to roar of the lawn mowers in the neighbourhood. Still silence can be LOUD.

Take a walk into the woods, away from the urban sprawl spinning through the city, to a place of tranquil beauty filled with green light and you can still be surrounded by a texture of alienating amplification. Sometimes its nearly impossible to run away from the irritating sounds of silence. The faster you run, the more it echos back at you like a teasing Siren in hot pursuit.

Even when we pray, we tend to do so within a tunnel of clashing daggers. We're always asking for help! Our inability to silence the vapors leaves our spirits unnerved to a point where we give up on believing in God (he's not answering through the din!!) and we begin to fear it, thereby adding more noise to mix in order to avoid being alone in the silent rattle and hum. Alone with our cacophony of thoughts is akin to spiritual unrest. How frightening is that? Are we thinking too much perhaps, thereby perpetuating the noise? Are we trying to "think it through.....?"

Evelyn Underhill, whose name reminds me more of an old lady typing teacher than the mystic she is revered as, once wrote...." We mostly spend our lives conjugating three verbs - to want, to have, and to do. Craving, clutching and fussing, we are kept in perpetual unrest." I believe she nailed it. Self absorbed in our wants, needs and actions, we forget that silence can be the most priceless gift we can receive rather than something to avoid.

Paradoxically, the more wearied we feel, the more the volume is turned up. That is, until you reach a point where you can give it up ..... an intellectual surrendering .... until there is a shift .... a shift towards recognizing the need to peel away the layers of human made complexities, leaving the soft white noise of simplicity. It's a healing of sorts, this surrendering. One which may take time, but one which aligns with opportunity. We can return to the lullaby of silence......

And as you reacquaint yourself to this meditative experience, when all that you think matters becomes faint, the pathump of the heart calms. the absorbing worries slip into serenity. The lonely ache of wanting to be affirmed is replaced with a tenderness of knowing you're loved..... of feeling a presence stopping beside you. True silence can happen in the noisiest of locations, right in the middle of world chaos. Why? Because silence is the absorption and integration of sound filtered through the heart and not the head. Silence of the heart is always buffered by the child like presence of grace notes.

It feels as soft as brushed cotton. Want to touch?