Silence can also be a friend. A comfort and a source of deeper riches. In The Silence That Follows, the poet Rolf Jacobsen wrote:
The silence that lives in the grass
on the underside of each blade
and in the blue space between the stones.
The silence that rests like a young bird in your palms. It is easy to see oneself in Rolf Jacobsen’s experience. Alone out on the ocean, you can hear the water; in the forest, a babbling brook or else branches swaying in the wind; on the mountain, tiny movements between stones and moss. These are times when silence is reassuring. I look for that within myself.
— Erling Kagge, Silence: In the Age of Noise
Notes: Photo by Chris Jones with Blades of Grass. Prior Erling Kagge posts here.
Live & Learn 
This text reminds me gently of those innocent days where we kids had to do some hours of weeding at my gran’s house and then, when the adults started playing cards, we laid there, in high grass, looking at the world, the clouds, the tiny beetles, when we did daisy crowns and learned how to whistle on those long blades of grass….. something I never mastered. But I often cut my skin on those razor sharp blades! And even tough we talked, there was a bigger, welcoming silence, peacefully wrapping us up, guiding our eyes towards the playful clouds chasing each other in the sky above .
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Wow, beautifully captured Kiki. So good. Reminds me of:
There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favorite book. Everything that filled them for others, so it seemed, and that we dismissed as a vulgar obstacle to a divine pleasure: the game for which a friend would come to fetch us at the most interesting passage; the troublesome bee or sun ray that forced us to lift our eyes from the page or to change position; the provisions for the afternoon snack that we had been made to take along and that we left beside us on the bench without touching, while above our head the sun was diminishing in force in the blue sky; the dinner we had to return home for, and during which we thought only of going up immediately afterward to finish the interrupted chapter, all those things with which reading should have kept us from feeling anything but annoyance, on the contrary they have engraved in us so sweet a memory (so much more precious to our present judgment than what we read then with such love), that if we still happen today to leaf through those books of another time, it is for no other reason than that they are the only calendars we have kept of days that have vanished, and we hope to see reflected on their pages the dwellings and the ponds which no longer exist.
~ Maryanne Wolf, from Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain (Harper Perennial; August 26, 2008)
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God, sorry, Dave, you are incredible…. 🙂
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it is a higher level of calm than most of us experience in our daily lives, but one to remember and strive for. at least for a few minutes each day. beautifully said.
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Right on Beth.
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I experience transient moments of such silence and they are magical. But I always feel like I have stumbled into them…never seem to be able to settle into them at will, which I regret…
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EXACTLY, my experience. Was listening to a podcast this morning:
“The gotta gotta gotta gotta mind. I gotta do this, I gotta do that. I gotta call him. I gotta call her. I gotta make a list… I’d like to have some inner calm. Some inner clarity. Some inner equanimity.”
~ Bob Roth, #131 Transcend & Be Free!” in Under the Skin with Russell Brand (May 8, 2020)
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Reblogged this on It Is What It Is and commented:
I love silence … particularly early in the morning when no one has still awakened from their slumber … “The Silence That Follows”, by the poet Rolf Jacobsen.
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I am a big fan of silence. And so are my students when I ask them a question… 🙂
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Ha. So remember those days, slinking lower in my desk.
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I was the same way, so I can’t really call out my students for doing the same…
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I enjoy silence breaks, daily…sometimes by myself or with my dear one…we live a slow, quiet life…I used to carry earplugs with me to the gym…and always have earplugs in the car to tuck into the upper inner corner of pants pocket, that way if I enter someplace that seems too noisy for me or come upon a yard guy with a leaf blower I deploy the earplugs…We like to walk in nature quietly, sit and love it when a bird, a bumble bee, a humming bird, etc, delight the silence, adding Joy…
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❤
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