“Our task is to listen to the news that is always arriving out of silence.”
Rainer Maria Rilke
Stars over our garden, Somogy province, Hungary, February 2022.
Dear friends,
Since this is one of those times of the year when we wish each other all kinds of good things, I would also like to share with you my New Year's wishes. Besides all the things we usually wish each other (health above all, but also loving gatherings with the people who are important to you), I would also like to wish you lots of silence for the coming year.
Silence is a very precious commodity as far as I am concerned, and also increasingly rare in our urban environment.
Perhaps I am kicking in a wide-open door by saying that silence is important, or am I solemnly declaring something that is self-evident. But I don't feel that we live in a society that values silence, quite the contrary. And I have the impression that even people who are aware of the value of silence do not always live according to that awareness in our world.
Silence is actually something we can barely experience anymore in the densely populated Low Countries, or in any of the cities that already more than half the world's population can call “home”. But even in the middle of nowhere, silence is anything but evident, and this is not only due to our surroundings. Even in the most remote place, it is easy to escape silence in our digital age. Thanks to Star Link, we can now listen to Spotify anywhere in the wilderness.
Experiencing silence, then, often requires a conscious choice or even discipline. And silence can also instill fear, which is why silences in company are often immediately filled with conversation. And so also when we are alone, there is always the option of turning on the radio or the television, or scrolling through your newsfeed. And there are so many other ways to distract ourselves from silence, and therefore from ourselves.
For to my feeling silence is a doorway to ourselves, and to many other things. If that, again, sounds like kicking in an open door, I hope that that doorway at least is open to you as often as is possible.
Silence probably frightens us exactly because of that. Thich Nhat Hanh once said that nowadays we have to make a conscious choice practically every minute of every day not to be distracted by all the media that surround us 24/7. Because roughly two hundred years ago it was different: no Internet, radio or television, and for most people not even a newspaper. Something tells me that surely silence was more available two hundred years ago, as was darkness. Not that cities then were much quieter than today, but back then more people lived in rural areas than in cities, although the shift had already begun.
I myself am fortunate to be able to spend much of the year with my partner Agnes, who is of Hungarian descent, in a century-old adobe farmhouse in a large garden, on the outskirts of a small village in Hungary.
And there we can experience both silence and darkness much more frequently and deeply than in the crowded and constantly lit-up city. At night it can be very quiet in the garden and the adjoining forest, and then the only thing audible is the wing beats of the bats or owls, and the rustling of the leaves when it is windy. Or the occasional cries of the male deer in the rutting season, or now and then the screeching sound of martens. You hear no hum of distant traffic, no cars, no radios. Silence.
Silence, beauty and also darkness, as a holy trinity, can awaken something in us that reconnects us to unsuspected layers of ourselves, to our intuition, to a knowing that we cannot explain or justify. Silence can make us feel again our roots that always and everywhere connect us to our Mother Earth, roots that we, however, forget and allow to fade away from our consciousness in our hurried life that is always flooded with information and images and sounds.
Not that it is always quiet in our village, quite the contrary. Especially on weekends, many villagers begin to do chores, mowing the lawn, clearing leaves with their leaf-blowers, doing carpentry or sawing or drilling.... Sunday is often the loudest day in the village, oddly enough.
And almost every household has one or more dogs, and those dogs are guard dogs, not lap dogs. If something or someone passing by in the street doesn't please those dogs, a racket is the result. And our dog Cheddar then gladly joins in, for he thoroughly enjoys the canine customs of village life. And that can happen just as easily at night. Sometimes, for God knows what reason, one of the dogs in the village will start a howling complaint, and in no time at all, the whole night is filled with the barking of countless dogs, who seem to be engaged in a fierce discussion in which the loudest one wins. But fortunately this does not happen all the time, so that there is still plenty of silence audible every night. For silence is not the absence of hearing, it is precisely the intensification of hearing, and listening to silence is not the same as listening to nothing. Silence is audible, palpable, and tangibly present, and it penetrates through our auditive canals into that part of our consciousness that resonates with what silence is telling us.
The most silent silence I ever heard was in a remote canyon in Death Valley, California, in the summer of 1994. How we had ended up there I won't tell you now because that would make this musing far too long. In any case, that summer day Agnes and I had hiked a short distance in a small canyon a long way from one of the roads that cross Death Valley. Needless to add, it was hot: summer in Death Valley is a killer, and that day was no different at 125 degrees Fahrenheit. We constantly had to tie towels dipped in ice water around our heads to walk just a few hundred yards, and after a few minutes the initially soaking wet towels were bone dry. So when I hear reports now of temperatures over 120 degrees Fahrenheit in India, Pakistan, the Middle East or elsewhere, I have a sense of what that feels like.
We sat down on a large stone, and looked around and listened. The silence was absolute, but suddenly I heard something, I had no idea what. A soft ticking. Suddenly I understood what it was: my wristwatch. Which, by the way, was a very quiet wristwatch, and I had never in my life heard my watch ticking. But the silence there was so intense that even that became audible. So I immediately took off my wristwatch, and put it down a long way away on a rock. Returning to our resting place, I continued listening to this silence, which was truly deafening. Thick, intense, resonant, enveloping us like a blanket of energy and fullness. Since then, I have never again experienced such a “thick” and intense silence. It is not for nothing that so many saints, visionaries and prophets have spent time in the desert. If silence contains information, then silence in deserts certainly contains the very highest concentration of information.
Silence can be far more tangible, real and penetrating than any words, something contained in the old dictum “speech is silver, silence is gold”.
American author Herman Melville (1819-1891), author of “Moby Dick,” put it this way, “Silence is the only Voice of our God.”
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart said, “The music is not in the notes, but in the silence between.”
Silence is like the endless space within which all our creations and relationships can arise, and that space is not empty, but full. Just as the quantum vacuum is full of energy and potential (see my blog post “The scientist, the monk and the philosopher"), so is silence full of energy and potential. And silence and our consciousness are two expressions of one whole. And you're going to sense something like that very much in a desert, I can tell you.
Over the next few weeks, I would like to share a few more musings about what silence means to me, also in light of my current pursuits and my focus on the many problems we face on this beautiful planet. I think we all have much to gain from more silence, from more stillness, from listening to what the planet is trying to tell us. Even if we may initially prefer not to hear that news. The news the planet can tell us when we are quiet is often of a very different order than the news we hear on radio and television or read in the newspaper.
As frightening as the news from the world seems to become, in silence we hear other things as well.
As Arundhati Roy put it, “Another world is not only possible, it is on its way. On a quiet day I can hear her breathing."
But so to hear that other world already breathing, silence is necessary.
I wish you all a very happy year’s end, and a wonderful, magical and healthy 2025, with lots of silence too.
Thank you for reading, and until the next installment in the new year,
All the best,
Filip
