The Eloquent Silence

Words come, filling the blank pages. Music comes, emerging from the silence to the somethingness of tone and rhythm. Images emerge onto the empty canvas or on to the tape or film. It is as though the emptiness waits---solely for the purpose of being filled.

So I have thought that with these Blogs I could open an empty space, and the words would come and shape the moment, finding some pathway to the substance, an underlying isness waiting to be disclosed.

Silence is not the same as nothingness. Silence is the emptiness of creation poised on the verge of becoming. We come from the silence, from the beingness that contains awakening awareness.

I remember when I first discovered this (before the acknowledgment that I have always known). I lay dying on the floor and a woman named Viola, who had glided into our lives in a moment of need, cupped my face between her hands and called to me from the silence. I awoke into the presence of restored conscious awareness. Not only was I no longer dying, I found a source of creative flow, a fountain of ideas manifest as writing, music, performance, and visual imagination. In that instance from the silence I knew myself, suddenly aware that knowing was the nowing of the silence, and knew was the perpetual newness, the newing of the now. Even now, words fall short of the magnitude, the eloquent silence.

Viola had made the silence so tangible that for months afterwards I tried to grasp the somethingness of existence as a substance, a materiality I could hold in my hands, an illusion created by intense awareness. Somehow I sensed that this was what Einstein had discovered for all humanity---that energy was mass converted by the speed of light squared. The speed of light squared is consciousness, awareness converting substance from spirituality, giving birth to the true material of the cosmos, the very source of all that we are.