Silent Hymn

My silence walls me in, and I wonder who I am. 

And where.

I notice that there is more that I don’t need to say than gets left unsaid, though I long to say it.

I look around and soak in the energy of the other person in front of me. 

I try to listen without wanting to speak. Without needing to speak.

I am different without sounds. It is not that I am not me. 

It is not that I am soundless and invisible.

It is not that I feel like someone in the corner of a crowded room, ignored by the general uproar, hoping to be seen by a room of strangers who I wish were friends.

No.

In that room where there is so much noise you are glad to be a shard of silence, I am at the very center, the heart of it, and I am seen.

I am seen but it as if around me is a pane of glass, smooth and bending, winding it’s way in obscure, invisible patterns.

When I am seen, the friend moves closer, and I smile. But they get lost in one of the passageways of the folds of glass and their eyes slide away, confused and determined to move on to a situation they can understand.

Charades only lasts so long. 

Charade-pantomime works when both the speaker and the non speaker collide together in playful concentration. 

And even then the glass panes insist upon sliding between. 

The silence presses on me. I cannot hum, I cannot sing to myself. 

Idle conversation is completely discarded, and in its place is the recognition of the deep soul longing to say something unsayable, to be known at a speechless level which can only be reached, it seems, through endless vocalisation.

I realize in every moment what I wish to share most— vision.

The verbal unfolding of what we see, of what we would like to build together in the future.

To build out loud in words— words that seem to come alive in beautiful clouds of imagination.

But is it necessary that all words of creation be spoken? 

I notice that many of my words want to repeat themselves, to become tracks in the ground for other people to travel on. For me to follow.

Without words echoing in the air, only the wind echoes. 

I hear the voice in the wind and it is both mine and not mine, filled with my thoughts and many I have never thought.

All the reactions I start to express originate in my gut and twist to my face where they get stuck and wonder why they are there in the first place.

I see in their undulating purposelessness their desire to be like a heron diving for a fish— swift, abrupt, incomprehensibly in tune with their surroundings.

But my “witty” remarks I am so proud to have and feel bereft without are not a swooping bird in its natural state.

They are a veneer, albeit a fun one (usually), of my human existence— my brain separate from the full connected life around me.

Without speaking I try to speak that language and put aside the fact that the humans alongside me cannot respond to my humanness.

Without speaking, I listen to the silent hum that exists underneath everything.

Without my voice I see in the faces around me a kind of appalled joy— panic and freedom: the duality of fear that being voiceless erases us and the blatantly clear knowledge that none of us is lost without it. 

In my quietude, I long to sing.

More than all the words I wish to say, I long to sing.

I beg one of the night birds to do it for me so I can listen and present the concert in my head, but the night is so quiet.

Perhaps quiet is what I need right now.

Perhaps in the most perfect of ways, I have finally swam into the middle of the lake and hang suspended mid-water in sweet freedom from my body.

So I am quiet.

May I use my human instrument all the more thoughtfully and lovingly when it returns.

In joy 

Alexa