the busy edge dissolves

 

 

 

The object in meditation and all of our contemplative disciplines is silence. But… 

that silence is in order for you to perceive something other than yourself — 

what you’ve arranged as yourself to actually perceive this frontier

 between what you call your self and what you call other than your self, 

whether that’s a person or a landscape.

One of the greatest arts of poetry is actually to create silence through attentive speech — 

speech that says something in such a way that it appears as a third frontier

 between you and the world, and invites you into a deeper and more generous

 sense of your own identity and the identity of the world… 

 

Poetry is the verbal art-form by which we can actually create silence.

Silence is frightening, an intimation of the end, the graveyard of fixed identities.

 Real silence puts any present understanding to shame; orphans us from certainty;

 leads us beyond the well-known and accepted reality and confronts us 

with the unknown and previously unacceptable conversation 

about to break in upon our lives.

In silence, essence speaks to us of essence itself

 and asks for a kind of unilateral disarmament, 

our own essential nature slowly emerging

 as the defended periphery atomizes and falls apart.

 

 As the busy edge dissolves we begin to join the conversation 

through the portal of a present unknowing, robust vulnerability, 

revealing in the way we listen, a different ear, a more perceptive eye, 

an imagination refusing to come too early to a conclusion, 

and belonging to a different person 

than the one who first entered the quiet.

 

 

 

 

 

 

~ David Whyte

from  Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning

of Everyday Words

 photo by Aaron Burden

with thanks to BrainPickings