The opening of one of my favorite poems begins as such:
I’d like for you to be still
It is as though your are absent
And you hear me from far away
Neruda, in this work, finds a sameness in stillness and the duality of love and melancholy. I think that beyond the beauty I liked the message of the poem. I think I liked the idea of silence being something you emerged from. I fear I also see silence as something you emerge from as if drowning and my mouth stutters senselessly and carries me towards fresh predicaments day to day as if to stop–to recognize the stillness itself–would be to drown.
A few nights ago I could not sleep. I lay there in the dark troubled by thoughts of death and ghosts and all my failures enswirling me like the hot blanket that gripped my skin. I could not escape and still make effort to sleep. Both would not have been possible. So, I lay there and accepted the melancholy of the dark and the silence.
And then I emerged. Subsequent nights have found me suffering from the same affliction, but each successive visit to silence is an opportunity to face it; to chip away and that long forgotten pile of thoughts and despairs waiting for me there. In the stillness there is the breath and the thought and both guide me like the white bars of highway leading to an inner peace.
We all need silence. In this world it is perhaps the hardest thing to achieve. We run to the woods, we take long walks, we leave things behind in search of quiet, but it has always been right wherever we are. I believe I was too frightened to reach for it. Easier to reach for a device than to not to. Perhaps the key to being balanced and at peace is to not reach.