As I walked through the silence that held the world, I wondered about my life and what I would become. The clouds piled on top of one another. The trees edged the fields with a thick bevel of green.
I saw cattle in the pastures. Pigs in their sties. And I was able to realize many things:
Our lives are ours to spend as we please. We owe nothing to anyone as to outward appearances.
To be free is to voluntarily participate in what is necessary.
Time is the container for all we need on earth.
What is necessary changes. if we don’t change with it we will die a death that is worse than death.
I realized the world is a created thing, and that we participate in its creation. The right kind of silence allows us to pass through the veil of that creation into something beyond our ordinary understanding. When we are in that place, the world is like music. The animals, trees and hillsides are its song.
I understood myself as one who had never been satisfied.That without a meaning for my life, beyond what was immediately supplied, I would always be restless, and would remain untouched. I understood that my love of silence was part of that longing.
As I walked the sea road along the cliffs, I came to a place where it turned inland.The gulls faded. The fields gave way to forests of pine. I passed a few cars that had been pushed to the side and abandoned. I thought of how the cities had once been filled with them. The strangeness of that. The chaos and noise. It occurred to me that history is not a record of what we thought, but a record of how we thought.That cars for instance, were only possible, when people’s dominant mode of thought was mechanical and dry.
I wondered what a world would look like, in which the dominant mode of thought followed the laws of growth like a rose, or a field of strawberries carefully tended.
I realized that silence was not an absence, but a presence. A medium, or an antechamber, to the world inside this one.