Lately, I have been choosing silence over music, silence over reading, silence over distraction. I spent an entire day just contemplating my relationship with silence, both mine and others'. There was a season in my life, when I was young, where silence did not soothe, it swallowed me. I swam in the seas of withholding and disappearance from others. Silence was used as a kind of punishment, and I learned to fear it. I formed this anxious bond with life, always measuring silence as a reflection of my own insufficiency. If things were quiet, I must have done something wrong. If no one was speaking, it must have been because I was unworthy of words.
And then, when one of my brothers died suddenly, a new silence arrived. Not the kind used to shame, but the irreversible kind, the kind that falls like a great hush over everything. The silence left behind when someone chooses to disappear. It is a silence that lingers in the bones. Of all the types I have known, this one has been the hardest to move through. Because in one breath, there is presence, and in the next, only absence. A quiet so massive it almost escapes language.
In that space of aching silence, sometime after his death, I heard the words: Ein Sof. Words I had never learned. Words I had not read. But words that felt like they had always lived inside me.
Grief is a portal. And this kind of grief, the sudden, blindsiding kind, opens the deepest one. The kind that shatters your inner world and remakes it entirely. In that collapse, I did not find emptiness. I found expansion. What I had mistaken for absence was actually presence in its most infinite form. A whisper from beyond the veil. What felt like nothingness was, in truth, the uncontainable vastness of what is.
Ein Sof, the Infinite, revealed itself not as something far away or abstract, but as a living pulse within all things. Not a static being, but a sacred becoming. A flowing, breathing mystery that undergirds the entire web of existence. It is the breath before creation, the hush after death. The holy space where endings become beginnings. The mystery that lives in the silence between heartbeats and in the pause before a new life begins to speak. It is not separate from the world, it is what fills it, sustains it, and flows through every part of it. In those quiet spaces, I was not alone. I was remembering the ways of life.
That was my first initiation into the spaces within, though it would take many years for the full remembering to rise. Looking back now, I can see how it unfolded slowly, how the preparation was already happening, even in the deafening silence.
This week, I laid down in the middle of my living room floor and chose silence. The same silence I once fled. The one that used to feel like a black hole, but now feels like home. It no longer consumes me, it calls to me. Like the soft song of the Carolina Wren, or the fleeting shadow of a sparrow winging past my window.
And I realized: even in silence, there is never truly silence. Nature has taught me this. I am not separate from it, but a part of its rhythm. I watched the trees as they swayed and sheltered, unburdened. I listened to the bees hum and the crickets sing. I noticed the sheep walking my land, unhurried, at peace. I thought of Wendell Berry’s words, the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief.
All the years I spent running from the silence within, I was running from this truth: that the silence is not void. It is fullness. It is presence. It is life. It may be also be death and yet in the same breath, it is rebirth. There is never one without the other.
Questions for Deeper Work
What early experiences shaped your relationship with silence?
When have you mistaken emptiness for absence, only to later find it was fullness?
How do you experience the sacred rhythms of life in nature?
Where in your life are you being invited to lay down your fear and meet the silence within?
What would it feel like to trust that even in death, even in endings, there is a deeper becoming?
What I am listening to today:
Listen to The Blue Rose playlist here.