The Poetry of Intentional Silence (part 5)

As a psychotherapist, I often encounter successful people that are living so close to their lives, they can’t make sense of them. The narrow self-conscious mind makes lots of complications over what is potentially a much more beautiful and intimate encounter with the world. The yearning for a silent simplicity is why folk still go on retreat, meditate or do yoga, go for long runs, or seek the curious echo-chamber of therapy. In essence, many people are seeking to reinvigorate the flow between the narrow world of self-consciousness and what the contemplative Maggie Ross calls deep mind;  The multi-dimensional matrix in which everything happens  - from the implicitly choreographed dance of energy particles that create the illusion of materiality to the soft containing words spoken by a mother to her child.  For instance, when reading a poetic or spiritual text, as much as when sitting in a garden or bobbing around in the ocean, you have to pause to let the depth of what you’re receiving reverberate in you lest the poetic essence of the moment be lost forever.  It is the language of silent poetry.

Silence is not a material thing, it is a context and a process.  It is not an absence, nor a canvas waiting to be filled. It is also, of course, not ultimately threatening, as much as something deeply attuned to our humanity. But we often enter into silence as our fraught, self-conscious selves.  The ability to be wrongfooted by the incomprehensible thusness of simple things is lost to the grasping aspects of our self-conscious minds.  When I practice intentional silence outside, the poet Nature says things that I can't comprehend through conceptual or cognitive understanding. I have to be willing to let the need to explain fall into the background, to be present in silence to the intimations of the unexplainable. To be momentarily disarmed by the poetic dance of a palm leaf in the jungle trails of Kuala Lumpur is to be fascinated by an intricate dance of complex energy in its most direct outward form.  We are liberated from ourselves in these moments and the great silent poet of existence takes the place of the ‘I’ in us.  In Merton’s words, it helps us not to be suspicious, that everything is ‘unexplainably holy’ in all directions. The poetry of silence is to listen with utmost curiosity to the fresh and ancient songs of the world.

‘There is poetry as soon as we realize we possess nothing.’
(John Cage)

At the end of the short film  ‘Sanctuaries of Silence’, Gordon Hempton reflects on his journey through the Olympic National Park and muses “I think what I enjoy most about listening is that I disappear.”  I sometimes ponder about the delicious irony of the emptying out of the ancient noun ‘kenosis’ from our modern language.  Our schools anxiously teach children to push themselves forward in the world - to grow a ‘self’ - but neglect teaching the wisdom of erasing oneself.  Noise is so embedded in our world that sometimes we have to take a deliberate step back - and then again - to rediscover or fall into what the monk David Steindl-Rast describes as “that kind of happiness that doesn’t depend on what happens.”  All infants and children, given a safe enough environment, intuitively settle into a kenotic rhythm during the day - just observe an infant drift deliciously into reverie and self-forgetfulness once s(he) has thirstily drunk in enough of the world.

The 12th century Zen teacher Eihei Dogen said that ‘we should live each day, each hour, in the same frame of mind as that of a man falling from a horse. In that brief moment before he hits the ground, all his ability and learning are useless, and there is no time to think, no time for daydreams or self-reproach’. Note the lack of anxiety or fear in Dogen’s falling man. Intentional silence repeats a daily falling off of ourselves, an unwinding of our usual mental scaffolding against the reality of the moment. We become positively bereft of our mental life rafts and survival strategies. And we receive - really receive -  the world.  We also survive, moment to moment, and so trust in emptiness knits together thread by narrow thread.  We must believe, as the contemplative Simone Weil intuited, 'that what we are unable to grasp is more real than what we are able to grasp’.  The empty poet of silence similarly grasps that not knowing is most intimate.

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