Since my recent post, Listen, I came across The Listening Path: The Creative Art of Paying Attention by Julia Cameron. Perhaps you recognize her name from The Artist’s Way.

In The Listening Path, Cameron includes a chapter entitled “Listening to Silence.” She introduces this chapter with a quote by Alfred Brendel: The word “listen” contains the same letters as the word “silent.”

She urges us to seek quiet:

I’m a person who craves quiet moments. My husband does not. He always, always has the TV running, even when he’s in another room; he has to have sound. I sometimes wonder if he fears quiet. I will stay up late at night or get up early in the morning to write in the silence before life awakens and begins stirring around me. When I was writing the poem “Listen” no one was home and the TV was off. I listened to the sea of my own mind, for what would surface. The house, cooling in late afternoon of a warm day, popped so loudly that I jumped—sounds were definitely “more pronounced.” And what does the house have to say? What does the silence itself have to say?

It occurs to me that quiet is one of the benefits of night. That is often the only time we are quiet. We know the brain repairs itself while we sleep. Does quiet not bring healing to the mind? Is quiet itself a form of repair, inherent in sleep? A release, for opening the gate to a “higher force”? Perhaps that is a fearsome thing. What might be heard?

One doctor I know said that dreams are the brain’s way of entertaining us while we sleep, but…tonight, as as I sit in the quiet, finishing this post before going to bed, I am thinking of a young boy who heard a voice in his dreams. He’d been kidnapped at sixteen and taken to a far country where he was a slave for six years. He learned the value of prayer in captivity, tending sheep. This night, the voice told him he’d go back to his homeland; his ship was ready. And it was. He escaped and found it, two hundred miles away in a place he’d never been before. He went home. Yet he’d eventually return to the land of his captors. He had work to do there. In Ireland.

His name, of course, was Patrick.

His day is hardly one associated with “quiet.” But in the spirit of one who listened…let us seek the quiet and what it offers; let us practice the art of paying attention; let us claim the calm and carry it with us, throughout the clamor, in all the work we have to do. Let us enter into quiet…and find our path.

Of special note in this regard: My grandfather’s middle name was—I promise I am not making this up—St. Patrick. I wrote about this a few years ago: My Grandfather, St. Patrick. In my lifetime, he was a quiet man. Not to be confused with the movie.

*******

The annual Slice of Life Story Challenge with Two Writing Teachers is underway, meaning that I am posting every day in the month of March. This marks my fifth consecutive year and I’m experimenting with an abecedarian approach: On Day 17, I am writing around a word beginning with letter q.