Weekend Journaling Prompt

The textures of silence

Next month’s book club pick: Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer • Upgrade to or renew an annual subscription to win my gorgeous desk essentials box • Talking about Wintering on Pulling the Thread • Discussing winter creativity with Anna Brones

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In Pico Iyer’s beautiful new book Aflame / Learning from Silence (the US and UK titles respectively), he explores the role of quiet and contemplation in his own life. Pico spends time in a monastery each year, retreating into silence amid a community of monks who have devoted their lives to this discipline. Here, he offers us a fluid, questing account of the different textures of falling quiet.

‘The silence of a monastery is not like that of a deep forest or mountaintop,’ he writes; ‘it’s active and thrumming, almost palpable. And part of its beauty--what deepens and extends it--is that it belongs to all of us. Every now and then I hear a car door slam, or a movement in the communal kitchen, and I’m reminded, thrillingly, that this place isn’t outside the world, but hidden at its very heart.’

I am always reaching towards silence, and I can never get quite enough. I often think that the opposite of silence is not noise, but responsibility. I wonder what life I would live without the perpetual drag of the mundane world on my attention. From this standpoint, it seems like the ultimate pleasure.

But I know, too, that silence can sour. In The Woman in the Polar Night, which many of us are reading together at the moment, silence is sometimes ecstatic, but other times maddening. There is a sense that the noise of the world is part of its structure, and without it, the mind can drift. In Sara Maitland’s A Book of Silence, there are moments when her mind drifts to the point of hallucination, reality falling away.

Perhaps that’s why many people fear silence; they are not sure what it will reveal in them. But I think we often assume that silence is entangled with two other qualities, solitude and stillness, which render it far more austere than it needs to be. Practiced in community, silence feels a lot like good company, safe, warm and even loving. Practiced in motion - for example, on a long walk - silence becomes fluid, curious, full of vitality. There is no sense in which silence has to be a withdrawal from the world. It is, in fact, a gesture toward greater connection.

In this week’s journaling prompt, we’ll find ways to explore our unique relationships to silence.