The Silence Between

The most beautiful music contains much silence. Beauty is between the notes. Sound without silent places, chords without hollow intervals, is just noise. Is your life a Gregorian chant, or Musak? The chant contains spacious intervals, fourths and fifths. Elevator music fills in all the space.

Great musicians don't show you how fast their fingers move, or how many notes they can play at once. Likewise, the art of living is not measured in hours or dollars. Beautiful living, like beautiful music, happens in the silence between.

Is my day a clutter of tasks with no moments for resting in my essence? What is my essence? Not thinking or doing, but being: fullness of being in the hollow center of now. If I sense no silent core, my day is wasted, a tin clatter of noises. What I do and what I make are worthless without what I am, just as music isn't music without a silence between the notes.

Moments of being turn work into music. When I find my core of stillness, I find my rhythm and make a dance of doing. I do the notes, and rest in the silence between.

Silence shapes music. Stillness shapes the dance. In the end, they are one. The whole play of creation is like an echo in silence, and silence in the echo.

Do what needs doing, a breeze in the pines. Then stop, look, listen, and be.