Friday 8 March 2013

Silence

I stood in the quiet and the dark, not wanting to turn the lights on because there was enough light coming in from the windows across the room, and my head couldn't take the fluorescence. It seems piercing today. 

The silence is piercing as well, but in a different way. There is no pain involved in silence. Just a sense of things greater than yourself. When people talk about "deafening silence" you sometimes wonder what they're talking about. Other times you understand. It is in this kind of silence that little noises come to the fore. The ticking of the clock seems thunderous.

It's cold in the room as I stand in the dark, eating my lunch. Cold and silence often go together. When winter comes, a quiet comes with it. The earth goes to sleep. Soon it will be time for the giant to wake, to shake off slumber and bring everything back to vibrancy. But not yet. For now, it sleeps and is quiet. And so I stand in the dark and the cold and the silence, watching the trees out the window, watching the snow and the stillness.

Sometimes these moments bring suffocation, the type that makes you want to shout, to clatter dishes in the sink, to speak, even in a whisper, to drag your feet across the floor - something to break the silence.

Other times the silence is a comfort, a help for you to quiet your mind, settle your thoughts, and breathe deep. To blink, to take five seconds and just be still. Be still and know that He is God. 

I listened, and the silence did not give me leave to break it.

1 comment:

By swallowing evil words unsaid, no one has ever harmed his stomach. ~Winston Churchill

Smart guy.