BootsnAll Travel Network



Silence

This came in a comment to an earlier post, but it’s so beautiful I decided to make it a post of its own, with gratitude to Christopher for sending it:

Silence. Advice / thoughts from Juan Ramon Jimenez (1881-1958):

Space, time, solitude, silence.

You find in solitude only what you take to it.

“Silence is golden, silence is gold.” Silence makes everything fit. It is the great ring of gold.

In silence I can have suspended–suspended in the instant– my entire day and even my entire life, in full synthesis. In noise I can only suspend the instant.

There are days when life becomes concave. How things resound in her– the yapping of dogs, the barking of orders, the screams of children, the chirping of birds, the sighs of women. Other days it becomes convex, and nothing resounds at all. Or better, everything ceases to sound. And then, how terrifyingly deaf my life is!

Silence does not waste time, it fills it. Yes. And the only thing that fills time is silence. So that time shared with noise is time lost. But silence conquers time, puts it back together, makes it whole.

When it is noisy, don’t sing; draw or sculpt your thought.

When a noise breaks into your silence, make it immediately a natural part of your silence.

Hearing silence and seeing shadow, our life is more luminous and expressive and dwells more within the eternal– I mean, within the sufficient.

O noises that do nothing to disturb the silence! Noises like thoughts, like meditations, like a huge force of inner concentration, when they seem to be listening to themselves, cloaked in their abstraction, in faded outline! noises like the verses of a poet, which hardly make any sound along the edge, with all the sound at the center; welcome, pleasant noises that I need and love: slow tolling of a bell, wandering little bird, falling beads of water.



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