Listening to Silence

"Above all things, love silence. Out of your silence will arise something that will draw you into deeper silence. If you practice this, inexpressible light will dawn upon you." ~St. Isaac of Ninevah

Listen to silence. The silence of your listening is love. Attraction of a subject for an object, a lover for the beloved, is only the shadow of love. 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 voluptuous silence. Sink into this. To attain the light, you must ascend, but to embrace divine darkness, you need only fall. Give up the work of rising.

"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.

The Black Madonna dwells at the core of every proton in your flesh. Your physiology doesn't need to think in order to experience God. Prayer is no metaphysical work of the mind, but a chthonic sensation of the infinitesimal Ayin Soph in the heart of the electron.

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 total universe of information is stored in silence.

The womb of awakened silence releases a silken spore, a thread of grace that passes from the sacrum through each tear on the rosary of the spine. A subtle glistening root ignites the brain stem, 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 Un-knowing? Let this radiant cilium, born from total surrender to the dark, dance through your backbone to the soft spot in your crown, raveling you up into the clustered galaxies.

Silence weaves the hollow of all that whirls, threads each mote of Mother Matter to a star. Silence in prayer, stillness in action, savored in deep meditation or walking through the December forest. Berries bursting in the void, wood and stone suffused with compassion, dreamless seeds awake in their loam, murmuring, "April, April." Nothing can ever die here.

Let distance dissolve in the splendor between your breaths, ever returning to the inner solstice where the sun is born, Winter after Winter, cradled in your chest. Didn't you not know that this is your labor of grace?

In the dark pause at the end of your exhalation, find the eternal moment where worlds are born. Center creation in a sparkling singularity, the crystal of your own divine night. Listen to the silence. The silence of your listening is love.

Photo: Spencer Butte, OR