My intention for this new year is to listen, listen to myself, others, and the world. 

I just finished reading Etel Adnan’s book, Shifting the Silence.  An artist and writer, she was born in 1925 and passed November 14, 2021.  This book looks at aging and loss.  What is it when we lose someone to Alzheimer’s or death?

I’m struck by certain passages and sentences.

Etel Adnan:

Bach’s music is the needle of the cosmic balance.

This has taken me into the core of a silence that underlines the universe: underneath the mesh of sounds that never cease there’s a strange phenomena, a counter-reality, the rolling of silent matter.

Silence is a flower, it opens up, dilates, extends its texture, can grow, mutate, return on its steps.  It can watch other flowers grow and become what they are.  We’re at the turn of the year, I have to invite somebody or something.  The live thickness of the silence makes sounds free themselves and expand.  The year is turning, has turned. 2018 is gone forever, gone into being the new year, people are dancing, 2019 has just entered, wide-eyed, utterly new.

Silence is the creation of space, a space that memory needs to use … an incubator. We’re dealing here with dimensions, stretching inner muscles, pushing aside any interference. We’re dealing with numbers, but not counting. Silence demands the nature of night, even in full day, it demands shadows.

She goes on to say: I consider the light that enters the room in the early hours of the day as a messenger of the sun, a direct voyager, a particle, a wave, who knows, but an object of sorts that left its solar source, covered miles, and landed on my skin. So the universe constantly visits us while waiting for us to reverse that itinerary.

Morning is still dark here this winter day, and I trust the turning, the turning that seeds, the silence that breathes and breeds in me.