The Garden of Silence, Part 1

"Inward. inward. To the sacred groves." -Mary Oliver                    

Longing for the seashore now, for a stretch of sand, I am floating on a memory from last year, being in Truro on Cape Cod. During a perfect September weekend after Labor Day, I led an art and meditation workshop on silence.  If you have never been there, think of Cape Cod as the shape of a bent arm reaching out into the Atlantic off the body of Massachusetts. Truro is on the National Seashore just north of the elbow, south of the fingertip at Provincetown, it has take-your -breathe-away stunning beaches on both the ocean side and the bayside.  We met (four friends) to share food, to take walks, to be in silence and to find through the process, a gateway to expand our creativity.  The inspiration for this adventure: Listening Below the Noise, a memoir by Anne D. LeClaire.  It tells the story of her personal commitment to silence, every other Monday since 1992.

The serendipitous fact that LeClaire lives on Cape Cod just a half an hour from where the workshop was to be held seemed too synchronistic to ignore.  So I looked up the author online just before my departure and sent her an email request, hoping that we might connect while I was there.  She is a writer of note, her most recent novel, The Lavender Hour as well as seven other novels has kept her busy along with family, a full schedule leading lectures, retreats and workshops. So I was surprised and delighted to get a positive response to my invitation to her to be a guest during a part of our weekend.  

She is a self-proclaimed "chatty-Cathy" who was not at all sure she could be silent for twenty-four hours in a row when she began the practice of silence.  But she did make it through that first day and consequently opened herself to a new state of mind like she had been away on retreat. Her inclination to continue these mini vacations has fed her as a writer and inspired a beautiful journey of a book on her experiences with silence.  Rainer Maria Rilke wrote, "[n]owhere, beloved, can the world exist but within." Silence takes you within, it also takes you, when it is a conscious choice, not a forced silence or an accidental silence, to an orientation that might help open the door to creativity and further self-expression. 

LeClaire writes, "[l]ike countless others before me, I would come to silence to learn how to listen." Not only to learn to listen to others better she notes, but to learn to listen within, to learn to listen to her better self, "into a sacred space where wisdom can be heard."  To find a space of silence is not so difficult a task for me, because I live alone, my days are frequently sans conversation, but this I have come to experience is quite different than intentional silence.  Of chosen silence, John Francis says in his story, Planetwalker, about his experience of seventeen years in total silence, "[m]y life altered." Mahatma Gandhi took one day of silence every week, every Monday for a year in 1926.  He said, "speak only if it improves upon the silence."  Anne LeClaire claims the power of silence has influenced and lighted her way more than any thing or any one during her more than twenty year practice.  In just five months of following in her footsteps, I am beginning to sense what she means. Chosen silence has begun to feel like a warm blanket around my shoulders on a cold winter day. It deepens the experience of my days, stretches out the hours.  

During the weekend in Truro we took our silence from bedtime through the first few morning hours of the next day, including breakfast.  Even that short a time frame proved difficult for some but it was a way to fold our conversations around the text in a first hand way. On Saturday before dinner, when Anne joined us for a drink, one of the women asked if she had ever broken her days of silence. She responded, "only once", when she was involved in an automobile accident and chose to speak to the emergency crew. She added that, because it was a day of silence, it seemed to support her in the process of staying calm. Detaching from conversation twenty-four hours at a time has given her the opportunity to tune into the deepest part of herself, to her own secret garden. And she says, “[t]he garden of silence is always there for us. Patiently waiting.  We only have to claim it.”  I am learning January can have its gardens of silence as well as any other time, along the seashore, close to home, or the sandy beaches in our minds.