Aug.15 Silence

Silence.

The true silence of the north woods.

Not a peep from the frogs. Not a rustle from the leaves. Not even a bird twittering gaily away.

Silence. Not cars clanking or motorcycles roaring or trucks rumbling in the distance. No neighbours calling out for their children or wives and husbands arguing over who knows what.

Silence – is truly deafening. It roused such a strange sense of foreboding. Like the calm before a storm. Like a pregnancy just before the birth. Like a look from my wife just before she kicks me under the table for yet another social 'faux-pas'.

It filled me with joy, with wondour, with trepidation. With a sense that the woods and lakes and sky were trying to tell me something, something important, but I was unable to hear. Was I was deaf? Had the city life of hustle and bustle destroyed my ability to hear in the silence? Was I doomed to yearn for a word from creation, a creation that begged and yearned for understanding and companionship; was I doomed to hear only the lies of man made consciousness – a consciousness full of self-conceit, a consciousness so unaware of its role in the grand symphony of life that it had turned music into noise, laughter into tears, and truth into lies.

Silence is, perhaps, the antidote for lies.

All the lies we tell ourselves and others and we attempt to create significance for our lives. But clearly, based upon the wars and violence and drug abuse and alcoholism and depression and heart attacks and cancers whatever lies we tell ourselves to bloat ourselves with deluded self-importance have not truly convinced us that our current values and ways of living are life-filling or life affirming. Because the way we live seems to only bring more death.

Even, or especially, the fact that there are now 7 billion of us infesting Mother Earth, tells me that we have become that worst of all cells in the body; cancer. Growing exponentially in number, with no specialized function to help the entire body, the body of the Earth, become healthy and achieve its true purpose (more on that later). No, like cancer cells, we are becoming all the same, all sucking resources from the body of Mother Earth and giving nothing in value in return except poisons like carbon dioxide that is altering the climate in ways that we will only understand in retrospect and nitrogen runoff from fertilizers that run into the oceans and kill all life in that region.

No – there is not enough silence, yet, to cut like the sword of truth through the lies of our current so called 'civilization'. For, if we were truly civilized how is it that the suffering not only of people, but plants and animals and the very earth filled with worms and bacteria itself groan and cry out for justice.

They cry out for silence.

For the truth it brings. For the wake up it will bring, for the removal of the blinders that make us unable to see the destruction and hate that we are, admittedly blissfully unaware that we are doing so, inflicting upon each other in our feeble attempts at happiness and meaning creation.

So, dear friend, find silence. Bask in in it. Let the roar of it fill your being. Let time flow so it stops and you realize, perhaps for the first time, that your life is a lie. That our current dreams our only wrecking havoc and death and destruction.

And then choose another dream. Dream.

Perchance to choose to live out a new dream. A dream where silence is not to feared by is welcomed like a best friend.

Thank you friend.

Thank you silence.