Claiming My Corner of Silence

Above all, to be alone with it all

I spend more time alone by choice than anyone I know. And by “choice,” I mean my entire body-mind-soul insists on it.

For starters, I’m married yet live alone, in a separate dwelling a ferry ride and drive away from my partner. My home-for-now is a one-room cabin in the woods on enchanted Salt Spring Island.

I moved here for the solitude. And the silence.

Yet, that’s not entirely accurate.

For one, my home is shared with two unfortunately loud, shamelessly narcissistic Siamese cats.

For another, we are surrounded by the most lively, lovely company. Songbirds, croaking frogs, morning-time roosters, wind in trees, rain on the roof and window panes.

The concert is constant.

When it does reach a settling place, a place closest to silence and sleep, there is a hum there too.

It’s there always, really, this sound of silence that, like the white page, usually goes unnoticed for all the letters and words.

But it’s always there. Present. Alive. Watching.

I’ve come to look for it now throughout the course of a day, with all a day’s letters and words and distractions. I’ve come to crave it more than anything at all.

I have a seemingly insatiable thirst for more and more solitude to tune into this…which, turns out, is precisely the opposite of aloneness.

For although I call it the “sound of silence,” a soothing hum always in the background yet shy of human society online and off, it’s really not silent at all. It’s the sound of Everything and All of Us.

Call it consciousness, if you want, though even that feels too small. In any case, words miss the point entirely. Lines on a page. Distraction from the white space that makes their very construction doable. Noise amidst the quiet field that holds them and every other possibility.

In the end, any illusion of solitude leads here. Back to our single Source. Back to all of us. Back to One.

Meanwhile, I practice — in aloneness, on the page, writing possibility and self into being.

In the words of David Whyte:

“make yourself a door through which

to be hospitable, even to the stranger in you.

See with every turning day,

how each season makes a child

of you again, wants you to become

a seeker after rainfall and birdsong,

watch now, how it weathers you

to a testing in the tried and true,

admonishes you with each falling leaf,

to be courageous, to be something

that has come through, to be the last thing

you want to see before you leave the world.

Above all, be alone with it all,

a hiving off, a corner of silence

amidst the noise, refuse to talk,

even to yourself, and stay in this place

until the current of the story

is strong enough to float you out.”

— David Whyte, excerpted from “Coleman’s Bed”

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