The gift of Angerona
In silence I’m not
I dissolve into wholeness
Breathing in out
the pulse
of my surroundings
Erasing limitations
the form
Silence - a full reflection
The moment onto a water surface
In silence effortless, I am
So weightless...
intention and action at once
Manifestation in every embrace a self-embrace
In silence...
so much diversity no noise
our tapestry birds embroider with their songs
waves wash it
winds spin the thread
mountains witness
roads wreathe the length
fearless trees we expand In silence
I am far away
and still here
While silence may be the lack of auditory friction or absence of noise, from the soul aspect of the heart, silence is synonymous to receptivity through stillness. Silence listens thinning down the boundaries between the individual and collective soul. Permeating matter and soul, it journeys through the physical and perceives the interdependence of life in its entirety.
Poetry as a form of language approaches the immediacy, fluidity, phenomenological stratification of silence. Sound lives in silence undistinguishable with no beginning and no end. Silence to the soul is like water to the earth and blood to the body. A cytoplasm - active, vibrant and yet contained, which envelops the variety of world forms where we humans function as mere organelles.
A binding aspect of the human heart, silence travels deep and suffuses the qualities of things, disperses them into their surroundings, making them available for all, When we are able to dwell for a time in silence, we perceive something of the soul of the world, integral psychologist Robert Sardello writes.1 Therefore silence is best perceived through silence. Silence may be the direct experience of another.
Several years ago, I went to an enlightenment intensive silent retreat. We were a group of twenty people. We couldn't speak to each other, nor read or write except during our forty minute dyad exercises, five times a day. The first day of the retreat, we were given three questions to pick from: Who am I? What is another? What is life? I spent so much time thinking about which question to contemplate on. What if I picked the wrong question and wasted my entire retreat? At the end, it was clear that all questions were just different entrances for the same space – our collective heart. The process of getting there is what mesmerised me.
I picked: Who am I? And every time, when I received my partner and then was given my dyad prompt: Tell me who you are, I slowly recognised that the more I listened deeply, the more the experience of who I am circled through another. This profound feeling of empathy was silence, and the direct experience of singularity – the world soul wheeling the vehicle of one’s own stillness, reflecting in the still of one's soul.
Today, Angerona sits on the verge of two shores - Thanksgiving and Native American Heritage Day, watching the celebration where both ends of the wishbone are thrown over the hushed bones of history. She never spills her jewels but one, when silence grows deep perception flows wide. And one sees the abundance of anima mundi manifesting in a constant equilibrium of forms, emerging through the potential of conception, birth and death. Where darkness brings healing and transformation, nature inspires creativity and interconnectedness, and innocence nurtures the sense of wonder and direct experience of the world. Where the gift of community nurtures the sense of belonging and integrity. All the while, History teaches that equality is a dynamic and negotiated experience, and not a set point. American historian Ronald Takaki writes,
Embedded in the very birth of the United States in 1776 was a contradiction. The Founding Fathers had declared the ‘self-evident truth’ that ‘all men are created equal,’ but in 1787, they wrote into the Constitution a provision that implicitly legalized slavery... 2
As generous anima is, her preciousness may enter through the silence of a loving and grateful heart which oscillates back to the world. A sincere heart which has the capacity to discern from its illusions, to grow in its passions and to learn from its stillness. However, that responsibility is a shared action of the individual and the collective and again it starts with self-awareness, When you openly change how you participate in a system, you do more than change your own behavior; you also change how the system happens. 3
In our present times of alienation, fragmentation, violence, consumerism and addiction, one may say that the heart is disregarded. But I'm constantly reminded of Newton’s third law of motion, For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Once we recognise our interdependence as human species, it will be redundant to speak of equality. We'll have it in the very relationship of coexistence.
In the quite of this night, I hear the voice of medical intuitive and writer Carolyn Myss, Our fundamental organic theology is what we do to one we do to ourselves, and I stay with it.
Sardello, Robert. Facing the World with Soul. Hudson: Lindisfarne Press, 2nd Edition, 2004.
Takaki,Ronald. A different mirror: A history of multicultural America. (Rev. ed.). Boston, MA: Little Brown and Co, 2008
Adams, Maurianne et al. Readings for diversity and social justice. (2nd ed.). New York, NewYork: Routledge. 2010