Oct 29 2010
The Sound of Silence
There’s been silence across the plains of space for several months, and though I write mostly for myself and to use up my quota of words and enjoy seeing them fall onto the page, there are times when silence is like a pregnancy, there is always something happening.
Yes I have learned that there is always something happening. Silence can be still and subtle, sometimes loud like the thunderous rush of a waterfall in a canyon no one ever visits or sees. Noise does not have to be about an audience and so silence does not have to be about the lack of an audience, or the lack of sound.
Silence can happen amidst all the noise in the world.
My silence is possibly more like a solitude of the soul. My soul with its own words that no one will understand not even myself at times.
There’s been a lot happening in my heart ( that deepest of all places that we live and hunker down to watch our own ‘This is your life’ programme). I feel like the rafter coming through some dangerous, turbulent,unknown and uncharted rapids in a river canyon never explored, and I have emerged in sunlight finally and still deep waters. And you can never predict when you will come into the still water when you haven’t traveled this canyon before.
The stillness is more than the arrival of summer and the sun on my skin, it’s more than nearing the end of another year.
This weathering some un-chartered territory and getting through it somehow into the sun and still waters is all about grace to me.
None of us really likes to lose control of our lives, or to do something that has an outcome we cannot quite see. Sometimes we feel like we are going on a predictable journey and then whoa, a wild card comes in from somewhere or there is an unexpected detour and we are in the rapids out of control or on the road and lost, not knowing where this will end up or how it will in fact end. There’s the dread of potential pain on arrival.
To be sure there is a feeling of loving adventure and risk, and that’s usually calculated risk, but to jump without a parachute or enter the rapids without a paddle……….most of us don’t. We stay in the plane, or attach ourselves to someone else with a chute, or we climb around the rapids on good old earth beneath my feet styles. We like to keep life under some mild form of control or predictability.
The reason is that deep down we do value our lives.
Deep down we believe in our value on earth.
Deep down we are also afraid…….
When we have unexpected or the old periodic tune ups that life brings with the adventure of living, we get through. Maybe with a limp or the feeling of rawness that won’t go totally away, but it can feel like the arrival of spring when you get thru it. Its like you have been experiencing winter in your soul for the first time and you haven’t known when spring will arrive. You lose track of just how long the dam winter is and climate change has ruined everything, you know springs out there but you guts on day after day not knowing.
Then one morning you wake one and the ice is melting, bulbs poke hope out of the soil and you know spring is here, and you feel the light. You smile inwardly and your step quickens, somethings changed.
This too has passed, the winter of the soul, and you don’t understand the whys, and wherefores but you can laugh again and the sound of your laughter makes even you stop and listen as you realise that something has returned that was lost.
That is grace to me, that goodness that I don’t understand.
That belief that gives me courage to know that in the next rapid filled and dark canyon, I will not be alone.
Grace will be with me.
He is Grace. His grace is sufficient for me.
book says……
