Silence and Solitude

Silence is a source of great strength.
Lao Tzu

I need the silence, the stillness, like the air I breathe.

The clock on the wall is ticking, one of the pugs is drinking water, I feel the air from the overhead vent meet my skin. All else is still and silent. I am in my element.

This is the deepest thing I know how to teach and the hardest thing for my students to grasp. After we write we read aloud. People want to make comments, they want to tell you why they wrote what they wrote, what it means to them, they want to tell you all the things they left out, they want to rush at you with words. I stop them, gently, I don’t allow it. We write, we read, I say thank you, allow for a moment of silent respect, we go on. When you talk too much the power of what you’ve written is lost. You must carry it inside you, you must allow it to work its magic, if you talk about it you “let the air out of the tires.” We must learn to sit with our own thoughts, we must be fully present to our own lives.

When people rush at me with words I put my hand up to silence them, metaphorically speaking. I hold back, I let the waters of the world rush around me. I am an island in the stream. I have always been so. An only child I learned to keep my own counsel. I had no other choice. As years went by I loved having friends, a husband, my children, but I needed, increasingly, more and more silence to balance it all. When I became agoraphobic nearly 20 years ago, a trip out anywhere was so jarring it took me hours to recover. A trip to get groceries meant sitting for hours in the silence upon my return to be okay. I live my days in silence. No radio, no music, no t.v. Sometimes in the evening, late, past 10 when I get off the computer, I will watch something on Netflix but mostly not. I no longer watch the news. I need to feel the air against my skin, need to hear the clock tick, the pug drink water. I need to hear the things you can only hear in a deeply silent world.

I talk to very few people on the phone. I am not a phone person. I like to talk to my children, and hear the sweet voices of my grandchildren. I talk once in awhile to less than a handful of very close friends. That is it. I don’t enjoy social gatherings, abhor loud parties, cannot bear endless chatter. Some people live to talk. I cannot easily abide those people. I cannot rest easily in the loud jangling noises of the world. This may make me seem distant or cold or unkind and I am none of those things. I love deeply, I care enormously, and I want encounters with other people, when I have them, to be deeply meaningful. I don’t have casual friends and I don’t make casual conversation.

I am thinking about this now because as I started teaching again I took a deep dive back into more silence than I have experienced in some time. I do not long to find things to “fill up the time.” There are never enough hours in the day to read, to study, to write. The sands of the hourglass are trickling away and I have work to do. I am doing it now.

I wrote yesterday about studying Pema Chödrön’s work. I signed up for 3 of her courses which I will do back to back and repeat ongoing as a spiritual practice. This is not something I want to discuss or share or have conversation about. I will share what comes up for me here in my blog posts. Like the kind of silence I tell my writing students they need to allow after the writing that they do so they can go very deep with their writing and let it teach them and inform their lives this is very deep for me. I give what I have to give here, in the blog posts, in my other writing, in my classes, and then I retreat to read and study and write. It is what I both desire and require now. Herein lies my peace, my strength, my work.

I do love to respond to people, the lovely people who comment here on the blog, and I especially love Facebook because it allows me to have a feeling of community, and I can answer people or share things in the time and space that I have to do that but then I turn off the computer and walk away. It is “controlled communion.” I view social media in the same way. I can engage when I am able and then turn it off. I am reclusive by nature, I let very few people into my world. I am elusive, I am a ghost.

I am writing about this because I need to understand it all for myself. A couple of things have occurred lately that have made me pull back and want to run and I need to look at that, understand it, be at peace with it. I am here with you now as I write this, I am looking deeply into your eyes, I am hoping you understand.