Episode 132 -Nothing but Silence

With social isolation hanging over us all, I’ve been thinking a lot about silence. Not as in the absence of sound, but the absence of communication. When we don’t hear from someone, or when we don’t get answers to our questions. Humans aren’t very good at dealing with the unknown. It’s why we search for scientific discoveries and philosophise over moral quandaries. When there are uncertainties in our life, it’s our tendency to imagine every possible situation and drive ourselves mad. With God we don’t need to do that. I all too easily ask God for the answers, and then if I don’t hear the clarity I’m looking for proceed to tie myself up in knots imagining everything possible. What I should do is to wait for an answer and if God choses not give me the clarity I desire, then to trust Him in that. To choose to accept the unknown and to trust that all my life known and unknown is safe in His hands.

Still this is something I struggle with, even once I’ve made the conscious choice to let it go and trust God, my unconscious mind wanders easily from my choice and drags my heart and soul with it. It’s a short blog post this week as I accidently got distracted and wrote a poem while I was wrestling with all these thoughts and feel that I should share it with you. Hopefully it will mean something to one of you reading this…

Nothing but Silence

Your silence is deafening

It speaks so loudly

That I can’t hear a thing

It says so much

That I have no understanding

Of who you are

Or how you feel

My empty mind

Is forced to steal

An imagining

It has to fabricate

Of your overall

General mental state

It creates you angry and sad

And happy and free

Every possible face that could be hidden

Underneath your vanity

In and out of control

Up and down

Lost and found

With smile, with frown

Strong and weak

Kind and mean

At war, at peace

And everything in-between

And it all leads me to believe both

That you’re on your way home

And that you’re never coming back

The nothing that you speak leaves me feeling everything

Spinning me around

Filling up my head

Feeding my emotions

With the words you never said

All these mixed emotions

From what I speculate

Feeling loved, unloved

In love and in hate

Angry and sad

And happy and free

Jumping from one to the next

Drives my insanity

I know that we can never have

What we had back

But it doesn’t mean we have to give up everything

To get from the red to the black

Giving up what we had

Doesn’t mean having nothing at all

So please silence this emptiness

And let your words fall

We could build something better

Something even stronger this time

Or if not that then something different

Of a completely new design

Or if it at worst that this is how it must always be

Then let your words remove all other possibility

Because right now

Everything is possible, but nothing remains

There’s still not a day I don’t think about you

From sunrise to sunrise

Your silence fills my ears

And it fills my eyes

Without speaking you remain everything to me

And as you fade away on the wind

To you I become nothing