What is all this silence and solitude doing to you? (This question clearly does not apply to those sheltering in place with three children!) If you are alone or with another fairly quiet adult, stillness looms. Those who have tried silent retreats (three days or more) know that out of prolonged silence some pretty scary things can surface. Even if you have only tried silent meditation at home, you know how focusing on your breath can soon be replaced by that awful memory you didn’t even know you still had. But that troublesome stuff was affecting you, whether you knew it or not. Better, perhaps, to expose it to the disinfectant of sunshine (albeit slowly, gently, carefully). I recently heard a dharma teacher speculate that what often happens on long-term silent retreats may be the experience of many of us who are sheltering in place from the coronavirus, especially if we eagerly exchange the words in our minds for the digital chatter of technology. Is this happening to you?
We don’t want to listen to ourselves, not really. Most of the time we fight it, even though we may know there is constantly something inside us muttering things to our soul. The poet Christian Wiman puts it like this:
It is as if each of us were always hearing some strange, complicated music, in the background of our lives, music that, so long as it remains in the background, is not simply distracting but manifestly unpleasant, because it demands the attention we are giving to other things. It is hard to hear this music, but it is very difficult to learn to hear it as music.
What we can find in silence can initially be upsetting, but with time, it is music, it is prayer, and it can be a kind of salvation. Real mystics know this and so do good poets. In his poem entitled “How to Be a Poet,” Wendell Berry gives advice that is good even if you do not aspire to meter and rhyme. He tells us to: “Shun electric wire. Communicate slowly. Live a three-dimensioned life; stay away from screens.” And if we do, we can then:
Accept what comes from silence.
Make the best you can of it.
Of the little words that come
out of the silence, like prayers
prayed back to the one who prays,
make a poem that does not disturb
the silence from which it came.
In other posts, I have advocated journal writing and the composing of a life review. Perhaps we all have time and space during this Great Pause in life as we know it. And one of the reasons that writing (just for ourselves) is important is that it forces us to listen to ourselves. The author Shirley Hazzard said that “we all need silence – both external and internal – to know what we really think.” Sometimes, when we re-read our ruminations, there is a sense of surprise. This is because we never really paid attention to our own thoughts. This is somewhat strange in that we all like being listened to by other people, we want to be heard, and this is surely one of the things we are most missing in quarantine. Now we have just ourselves to listen to, if we do not succumb completely to digital chatter.
We should be listening in this Great Pause to what it is teaching us, not only about our lives (micro-level), but also about our world (macro-level). It you have not read it, there is a wonderful piece by Julio Vincent Gambuto at which includes the following passage:
I hope you might consider this: What happened is inexplicably incredible. It’s the greatest gift ever unwrapped. Not the deaths, not the virus, but The Great Pause. It is, in a word, profound. Please don’t recoil from the bright light beaming through the window. I know it hurts your eyes. It hurts mine, too. But the curtain is wide open. What the crisis has given us is a once-in-a-lifetime chance to see ourselves and our country in the plainest of views. At no other time, ever in our lives, have we gotten the opportunity to see what would happen if the world simply stopped. Here it is. We’re in it. Stores are closed. Restaurants are empty. Streets and six-lane highways are barren. Even the planet itself is rattling less (true story). And because it is rarer than rare, it has brought to light all of the beautiful and painful truths of how we live. And that feels weird. Really weird. Because it has… never… happened… before. If we want to create a better country and a better world for our kids, and if we want to make sure we are even sustainable as a nation and as a democracy, we have to pay attention to how we feel right now. I cannot speak for you, but I imagine you feel like I do: devastated, depressed, and heartbroken.
Please take this opportunity while the “world is stopped” to listen to yourself and to the world around you.
This week’s story, “The Listener,” is about how much it means to us to be listened to. In these solitary and silent times, maybe we can start by listening to ourselves and the world around us.
When I Come To Be Old 