“Now I’ll count up to twelve…and we will all keep still”

I’ve been reading the news feeds these past months with increasing dismay. It seems a particularly cacophonous world at the moment and I don’t understand it much. The political rhetoric is too inflammatory; the strangely-receptive crowds too much like jeering mobs. Racist, misogynistic, homophobic and xenophobic comments pepper the airwaves alongside insults and name-calling. Yet these are greeted not with disdain and wholesale dismissal as I would expect, but with enthusiastic cheers and chants. My consternation knows no bounds. Such talk falls, I think, shockingly outside the realm of common decency and the ideas, abhorrent and appalling, surely are legitimizing hostility and hatred. It’s upsetting and more than a little frightening. How did we get so far off track? Where did we go wrong? Indeed, the world is too much with me this summer and I seek a different realm, an alternative to bombast and pugnacity.

Perhaps that is why Pablo Neruda’s poem, ‘Keeping Quiet,’ [see below] resonates so deeply for me. It is an invitation to a world beyond words, where human clattering ceases and quietness reigns. It is the opposite of what we have right now. In the suggested pause of language and cessation of activity, Neruda suggests, the hating, hurting and harming can cease. In the ‘sudden strangeness’ of it, we can walk about as brothers [and sisters], beyond the barriers we have built and so assiduously maintain. In the new reality where we do nothing, we are able to deep dive into the long buried truth of our own alienation and our self-destructive ways. In this ‘huge silence’ we will find not death, but a new understanding and a new way of living.

Who can doubt that we need it? We are bombarded by rancorous debate and drown daily in tsunamis of anger. In a world of noise, confusion and conflict, it is necessary that there be places of silence. Our souls need to settle so that our spirits might come together. Withdrawal from the chaos is a prerequisite for healing and silence is our entry point.

Our spiritual tradition has long recognized our need for silence. It is, the elders affirm, a gateway to God. Thus Elijah finds God in the whisper and Meister Eckhart states simply, “There is nothing so like God as silence.” The great spiritual master Thomas Keating avers, “But silence, of course, is almost … well, it’s one of the great accesses to God’s presence within us.”

Silence is for me, an invitation to, ‘go to ground’, that is, the Ground of all Being. Plunging into silence, I am confronted with myself and my thoughts. Illusions fall away; past hurts rear themselves; fears of future test my serenity. I am continually challenged to let go of ego and enter the realm of Spirit. In the letting go, the unboundaried life becomes possible and the pettiness encountered in the everyday loses its power. I live freer and lighter when I have been in some silence.

It is mid-August as I write this. September is fast approaching and with it, for most people, school and work routines resume. The freedom and relaxation that the holidays brought is quickly forgotten and we fall back into the busyness and noise of the quotidian.  Here it is that we need to remember our need for silence, our longing for quiet. Here it is that we need to purposefully withdraw from the clamour of the world in order to seek our salvation. Here we need to say to one another, “I will count to twelve, and we will all keep still.”

KEEPING QUIET
Pablo Neruda

Now we will count to twelve
and we will all keep still.

For once on the face of the earth,
let’s not speak in any language;
let’s stop for one second,
and not move our arms so much.

It would be an exotic moment
without rush, without engines;
we would all be together
in a sudden strangeness.

Fisherman in the cold sea
would not harm whales
and the man gathering salt
would look at his hurt hands.

Those who prepare green wars,
wars with gas, wars with fire,
victories with no survivors,
would put on clean clothes
and walk about with their brothers
in the shade, doing nothing.

What I want should not be confused
with total inactivity.
Life is what it is about;
I want no truck with death.

If we were not so single-minded
about keeping our lives moving,
and for once could do nothing,
perhaps a huge silence
might interrupt this sadness
of never understanding ourselves
and of threatening ourselves with death.

Perhaps the earth can teach us
as when everything seems dead
and later proves to be alive.

Now I’ll count up to twelve
and you keep quiet and I will go.

Extravagaria, 2001.

By Sandra Prather, HOMI