One of the very first posts on this blog, back in February 2021, was on the subject of silence. I wrote there:

The fertile stillness that silence is seems very close to the dark transparency that sometimes one can touch in contemplation. It seems to me that in contemplation perhaps all we are doing is stripping away the accretions of thought and habit, draining the mind’s default mode that tries to fill our resting moments with its lowest common denominator daydreams. All that we are, all we have come from, rests in the ground of being itself, and it may be that we can touch the edge of that ground itself in silence, in the resting place between breaths, or the quiet of sitting still.

Spiritual silence is strangely independent of the physical absence of noise. As I wrote recently, I long ago discovered even among noise and distraction “the ability to turn inward, briefly, to a place of stillness and absolute tranquility.” That ability has remained with me, and it is one of the gifts for which I am most grateful.

Cynthia Bourgeault writes:

Those who come back from a near-death experience bring with them a visceral remembrance of how vivid and abundant life is when the sense of separateness has dropped away. Those who fall profoundly in love experience a dying into the other that melts every shred of their own identity, self-definition, caution, and boundaries, until finally there is no “I” anymore-only “you.” Those who meditate go down to the same place, but by a back staircase deep within their own being.

I think silence is the back staircase; and there is an argument to be made that all forms of contemplative practice are no more, at the very bottom, than means of silence. The heart yearns for silence, even in its passions; at the end of all things there is silence, and it is out of silence that all things come to be. Silence is the utter want of naming, of distinctions; it is no thing, but it is our only home in the end.