One: the silence upon waking when the furnace shuts off,
A cozy 20 degrees achieved after the night setting blinks to day.
Late fall at the cottage, no outdoor sounds
but the distant thud of long waves breaking on the beach.
Two: the hum of the cooling systems in the fridge and water cooler
During your attempt at meditation at the end of the yoga routine.
Even after forty years of practice, silence is mostly out of reach,
Struggling to still your mind, quiet your thoughts, but sometimes, lately, it works.
Three: walking on the beach, the silence a combination of water dragging over the sand and
Wind whistling through the boughs of Black Spruce on the rocks above.
The sun filtered through gray clouds glints off ripples of wind on the water
Throwing a thousand flashes of light into the pewter-coloured morning.
Four: the silence of being in your own head, especially while walking alone.
Solvitur ambulando, Latin for “It is solved by walking,” a phrase you had taped above
the desk in your office at the college for years, but only today learned from a Google search,
Is a metaphor for finding a solution through practical experiment.
Silences Five through Twenty: experiments to decide whether silence is good or bad
Resulting in, of course, neither. (Thank you Hamlet) because
“Nothing is either good or bad, but thinking makes it so,”
And so it is with silence.
But in this case, perhaps context, more than thinking,
As the silence of conversation that doesn’t flow
Or the silence of the ones you miss,
Or the silence of sadness and loneliness
Are not of equal weight.
May your silences be mostly good ones,
Or maybe not;
Have some of each,
And feel them, and live them,
In ways that help you understand yourself
And the world you quietly inhabit.
