Something is slowly shifting in my experience of silence.  Indirectly it started when I was moving into a new home in Port Townsend.  I have been in a shedding mode for a while now, with far less interest in “stuff.”  I moved my pared down array of furniture into a condo (downsized from a home I have cherished for years now). It is right and heart-breaking, as home dissolves.

The one thing I didn’t give away were my paintings, as each one comes from an interior place that is perhaps my real home.  When it came time to hang them on the bare walls, I just couldn’t.  The light was streaming in, dancing on the walls, patterns shifting with the wind and the movement of the sun. The shadows are living art.  The paintings still sit on the floor as I take time to appreciate what is pouring in.

Around then my affair with silence began to shift.  My silence practices have been a respite, and another kind of home. A cordoned off retreat from the fray, small timewise compared to the bulk of the rest of the day. Gradually, a figure ground reversal is seeping in.  The silence is getting bigger than the activities and impinging elements from the world. Not that I am sitting quietly longer. Silence is always here, wrapping itself around my daily affairs.  It seems more like gentle currents of air, everywhere, as I gently and often shift my attention to notice it.  Silence seems, sometimes, to permeate thoughts and “things” that have always punctuated my attention. Like a quiet living presence.

Last week I started to read a book that has been sitting on my nightstand for months, called Silence, by Robert Sardello. I suspect I needed to find my own way into this experience, before reading words in his slim volume, so that his words made sense to me from the inside out. I don’t resonate with everything he says but I know this terrain, and am grateful for his ability to find language for the dynamic, subtle, pervasive realm of silence.

I am glad to write today, and am eternally grateful for all of you who persist on this journey in your own way.  I think there are thousands of different textures of silence. All needed. With abiding love, Barbara