Color of Silence

"Above all things, love silence." ~St. Isaac of Ninevah

Listen to silence. The silence of pure listening is love. Attraction of a subject for an object, a lover for the beloved, is only love's shadow. Before any subject or object arise, before Creator even speaks the Word, "Let there be light," pure love trembles in waves of the primal sea, the quantum vacuum.

The darkness of love is the color of silence. Sink into this voluptuous darkness. To attain the light, you must ascend, but to embrace divine darkness, you need only fall. Give up the work of rising. Let gravity be your prayer.

"Now the earth was formless and void" (Genesis 1:2). Be the formless fertility of emptiness. Be where light is born, a seed dropped into the mothering furrow. Let gravity be your prayer.

You must ascend into light, but you need only sink into darkness. Give up the work of rising. Be where the light is born, a seed dropped into the mothering furrow of silence. The absolutely ineffable is the womb of all.

The Black Madonna dwells at the core of every proton in your flesh. Prayer is no metaphysical work of the mind, but a chthonic sensation of the infinitesimal Ayin Soph in the heart of the electron that flashes through a synapse in your brain. Yet this self-effulgent dot of no-thing is the same black whole that throbs at the core of the galaxy. Light emanates from every empty center, the quantum entanglement of quark and star. The empty center of love permeates all matter, and the total universe of information is stored in silence.

Awakened silence releases a silken spore, a thread of grace that passes from the your sacrum through each tear on the rosary of your spine. A subtle glistening root ignites your cerebellum, illumining the cortex with arboreal fire. Is your nervous system not the Tree of Life at the center of the garden, the Burning Bush that Moses saw in a cloud of Unknowing? Let that radiant cilium, born from total surrender to the dark, dance through your backbone to the soft spot in your crown, raveling you up into clustered galaxies.

Silence weaves through the hollow of all that whirls, threading each particle, each mote of Mother Matter, to a star. Savor this silence in deep meditation, or walking through the December forest, where berries burst in the void, wood and stone suffused with compassion, dreamless seeds awake in the loam, murmuring, "April, April come..." Nothing ever dies here.

Let distance dissolve in the splendor between your breaths. Ever returning to your inner solstice, let the sun be born, Winter upon Winter, cradled in your chest. This is your labor of grace.

At the end of your exhalation, there is a dark and infinitesimal pause. The is where worlds are formed. Here, creation is centered in a sparkling singularity, the crystal of divine night. Listen to the silence. Your listening is love.

Photo: Spencer Butte, OR