Silence

These past two weeks have been full of silence. It has been good silence, it’s been the kind of place where you can finally stop all the demanding voices around you and within you, stop the rushing, stop the performing and achieving. Be still and know that I am God kind of silence. There is a quiet place, far from the rapid pace kind of silence.

My mind really has been healing and I’ve got a whole lot better. The symptoms I had are slowly retreating. I wrote to The Lady yesterday and told her I felt as if I’ve come through a thick mist and am finally in the clear again. Or maybe I haven’t arrived quite yet but I’m on my way out to the clear.

I don’t know if there is any need for me to list all the things I have done and been able to do. Most of these things aren’t terribly special, they have been quite ordinary. But in each of these things there has been some healing for me. I went, for example, to my cousin’s summer house for a couple of days. The weather was horrendous, there was rain and hail and snow and sunshine almost all at once. After having been caught in a serious hailstorm once I didn’t do much walking outside. But I heated the sauna and dipped in the lake (that’s when the weather doesn’t matter to the least) and read and just watched the lake from the window. I have had lunch with several friends. One evening I stayed at my Baptist friends’ place where, before going to bed late at night, we read poetry. I finally bought a CD I had been wanting to have for some time – that of a classical guitar – and have been listening to it excessively. I’ve written emails and I’ve taken my medicine. I’ve been to a jazz festival where I had a privilege of hearing and seeing Dianne Reeves in all her genius and glory. It seemed as if she was made of pure jazz. On Friday I sneaked to my office and even managed to work for about two hours until a friend found out about it and told me quite severely to get lost from there. I’ve been also hanging out with my church youth as there happened to be a tragic death last week – a young girl from my church took her own life. And so we’ve been together, numb with shock and grief, not quite knowing how to react or what to do. So we’ve been doing what we could which is being together, eating pizza, laughing and crying, voicing our regret and anger, sleeping over so that no-one would have to be home alone.

I haven’t arrived yet, like I said, if there even is a destination to arrive at. But I’ve appreciated this time because it really has done something to my hurt and brokenness.

And I’m reading Frederick Buechner once again. He’s brilliant beyond all measure:

The question is not whether the things that happen to you are chance things or God’s things because, of course, they are both at once. There is no chance thing through which God cannot speak – even the walk from the house to the garage that you have walked ten thousand times before, even the moments when you cannot believe there is a God who speaks at all anywhere. He speaks, I believe, and the words he speaks are incarnate in the flesh and blood of our selves and of our own footstore and sacred journeys. We cannot live our lives constantly looking back, listening back, lest we be turned to pillars of longing and regret, but to live without listening at all is to live deaf to the fullness of the music. Sometimes we avoid listening for fear of what we may hear, sometimes for fear that we may hear nothing at all but the empty rattle of our own feet on the pavement. But be not affeard, says Caliban, nor is he the only one to say it. „Be not afraid,” says another, „for lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.” He says he is with us on our journeys. He says he has been with us since each of our journeys began. Listen for him. Listen to the sweet and bitter airs of your present and your past for the sound of him.

I try my best to listen. Silence is a good place to start from.