Kurt April
Professor
Silence
Silence
Long my enemy
Demands my attention
Silence
Is a form of fluidity
Not an enduring stillness … never stationary
Often welcomed
Sometimes rejected
In silence
My stories come
Incomplete
With present anxiety
Fast, uncontrolled
During silence
I seek to choose
Symmetry … control of my stories
Inspiring vistas, grounding spaces
I feel embraced
Vulnerable
Yet powerful
Silence births vivid emergence
Rendering an irrelevance of the present
Sometimes deepening my presence
Always inward
Yet, pushes me to move outward
Silence is often associated with the negative actions of communication and implies concealment, sometimes indicating hostility or disagreement, or the skilled interview/conversational technique to induce unease to the other person in the communication. However, the silence being written about here is about the more disciplined art of intentional contemplation. In deliberate silence, there is nothing to be known – what must, emerges from the holding space as full-body realisation(s). We can’t force it. In fact, we have to do the opposite. Let go, surrender and be open to accepting the direct experiential knowledge and wisdom that emerges from the practice of balanced self-perception. It is an inwardly felt-journey, mostly travelled alone and not with others, a returning, that leads to full presence, raised conscious awareness and a form of human healing – so directly opposed to the busy-ness and information push of modern lifestyles. As a result, one literally has to separate oneself from the resonance of modernity, and hone in on a more simpler thread. Change happens deeper than at a systemic level.