SILENCE IS THE SOUL’S BREAK FOR FREEDOM

We are each surrounded by an enormous silence that can be a blessing and a help to us, but from which we often turn away in dread and fear, a silence in which the skein of reality is knitted and unraveled to be knit again, in which the perspective of a work or a life or a relationship can be enlarged and enriched. Silence is like a cradle holding our endeavors, our will and our understanding in ways that allow them to grow and thrive; a cultivated and silent spaciousness sustains us and at the same time connects us to larger worlds that, in the busyness of our daily struggle to achieve, we have yet to investigate. Silence is fearful exactly because in its spacious depths lies both the soul's sense of rest and its possible break for freedom.

Adapted from
Crossing the Unknown Sea:
Work as a Pilgrimage of Identity.
Riverhead © David Whyte

Door to the Outer World: Ittingen Monastery, Switzerland.
Photo: © David Whyte June 2013