[Image: “No Still Waters” by John E. Simpson. (Photo shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.)]

From whiskey river’s commonplace book:

What is a life of depth? Is it to have a lot of deep experiences? Spiritual experiences? Enlightenment experiences? Or, are we immediately off the track when we envision any kind of experiences which would fill a life of depth? Important questions.

To really live a life of depth is to not depend on any experience at all — whether profound or not. Rather it is to let each experience point you back to the void from which it arose, to the state present before the experience itself.

To see each experience as your own perception of conditions continually emerging from the stillness of emptiness is half of it. To be reminded by experience (rather than hypnotized by it) to Return is the other half. So to live a life of depth, experience becomes the finger pointing back to the Before. It’s a reminder.

(G. Bluestone [source])

…and:

Silence

I have known the silence of the stars and of the sea,
And the silence of the city when it pauses,
And the silence of a man and a maid,
And the silence of the sick
When their eyes roam about the room.
And I ask: For the depths,
Of what use is language?
A beast of the field moans a few times
When death takes its young.
And we are voiceless in the presence of realities –
We cannot speak.

A curious boy asks an old soldier
Sitting in front of the grocery store,
“How did you lose your leg?”
And the old soldier is struck with silence,
Or his mind flies away
Because he cannot concentrate it on Gettysburg.
It comes back jocosely
And he says, “A bear bit it off.”
And the boy wonders, while the old soldier
Dumbly, feebly lives over
The flashes of guns, the thunder of cannon,
The shrieks of the slain,
And himself lying on the ground,
And the hospital surgeons, the knives,
And the long days in bed.
But if he could describe it all
He would be an artist.
But if he were an artist there would be deeper wounds
Which he could not describe.

There is the silence of a great hatred,
And the silence of a great love,
And the silence of an embittered friendship.
There is the silence of a spiritual crisis,
Through which your soul, exquisitely tortured,
Comes with visions not to be uttered
Into a realm of higher life.
There is the silence of defeat.
There is the silence of those unjustly punished;
And the silence of the dying whose hand
Suddenly grips yours.
There is the silence between father and son,
When the father cannot explain his life,
Even though he be misunderstood for it.

There is the silence that comes between husband and wife.
There is the silence of those who have failed;
And the vast silence that covers
Broken nations and vanquished leaders.
There is the silence of Lincoln,
Thinking of the poverty of his youth.
And the silence of Napoleon
After Waterloo.
And the silence of Jeanne d’Arc
Saying amid the flames, “blessed Jesus”
Revealing in two words all sorrows, all hope.
And there is the silence of age,
Too full of wisdom for the tongue to utter it
In words intelligible to those who have not lived
The great range of life.

And there is the silence of the dead.
If we who are in life cannot speak
Of profound experiences,
Why do you marvel that the dead
Do not tell you of death?
Their silence shall be interpreted
As we approach them.

(Edgar Lee Masters [source])

From elsewhere:

My days are porous. I follow no pattern. I open doors and close them again. Now and then I sit at the table by the window to write, but my language overflows. There is no healing to be found in sentences, they disintegrate, there is garbage and roses, stray notes which curl up and disappear. There are open windows, breadless birds, lost routines.

I shop sporadically. I drift in and out of the house. I pull out the box of provisions from under my bed and find supplies I don’t remember buying. I fetch cans from the kitchen, leeks from the garden and onions from the shed, buy odds and ends on quick trips to town. My day is jumbled, indecisive…

A restlessness has got into my day. Broken patterns and unpredictable journeys through the house. There are opened rooms and silenced doors in what was once an orderly day. Wakeful nights, sudden sleep, weary mornings and days with no structure. I walk across the grass at night, alone, without telescopes or hope. I stop short. Starshine, moonlight, celestial waste.

(Solvej Balle [source])

…and:

The Student

She never spoke, which made her obvious,
the way death makes the air obvious
in an empty chair, the way sky compressed

between bare branches is more gray or blue,
the way a window is more apparent than a wall.
She held her silence to her breast like a worn coat,
smoke, an armful of roses. Her silence
colored the smaller silences that came and went,
that other students stood up and filled in.

I leaned near the window in my office. She sat
on the edge of a chair. Hips rigid, fidgeting
while I made my little speech. February

light pressed its cold back against the glass,
sealing us in. She focused on my lips
as I spoke, as if to study how it’s done,
the sheer mechanics of it: orchestration
of jaw and tongue, teeth shifting in tandem,
shaping the air. So I stopped, let her silence

drift over us, let it sift in like smoke or snow,
let its petals settle on my shoulders.
I looked outside to the branches

of a stripped tree, winter starlings
folded in their speckled wings, chilled flames
shuddering at the tips. Students wandered
across campus as if under water, hands and hair
unfurling, their soundless mouths churning—
irate or ecstatic, I couldn’t tell—ready to burn

it all down or break into song. When I looked back
her eyes had found the window: tree, students,
birds swimming by, mute in their element.

It was painful to hear the papery rasp
of her folding and unfolding hands, to watch
color smudging her neck and temple, branching
to mist the delicate rim of one ear. I listened
to the air sunder between us, the feverish hush
collapse. I could hear her breath—smoke

rising from ice. I could see what it cost her
to make that leap. What heat it takes
for the body to blossom into speech.

(Dorianne Laux [source])