Winter Between The Notes

Winter morning. Two junco songs. Wait, listen. The moment of silence between them is a note in the melody of Presence.

This momentous sliver of silence is nectar, pressed out and overflowing, inebriating, eternally healing. It happens between chirps, between words, between ideas. Drink from this source any time of day, the infinitesimal serenity at your windowsill. If humanity practiced such listening for brief moments, we could transform the world very quickly.

Yet our schools never taught us to drink from the well of silence. They taught us to hear only the chatter, and argue with it. Our teachers never said, "Hear the wordless wisdom where a thought dissolves, before the next thought arises."

This sacred crevice is the blink of an eye, the pause at the end of your exhalation, the gap of ten thousand light-years from one electron to another, the interstice where our universe ends in no-thing, before the next big bang. These are all the same sacred space, beyond duration, where worlds are born. It is the space where we are waves instead of particles, vibrations of each other.

If you want your children to be creative, take them on a journey into the back yard. Teach them to vanish through the portal where the next junco song has not arisen, Sabbath between rain drops. This brief Winter of listening is the well of creation, that was already full before God said, "Let there be light."


Art by Elizabeth Ellison