What does your quiet sound like? Let me share mine. For as long as I can remember I have started my day during the early morning hours. Four or five o’clock is a good starting point for me. After I make my coffee I head to my desk and read for a few minutes and then I begin to write, by hand and in a paper journal. I have been journaling for nearly eleven years. I have been paper journaling for about a year. What I heard this morning was the inspiration for this post.

“The inspiration you seek is already within you. Be silent and listen.”

Rumi

I usually play music when I am writing. But when doing my morning pages I always want the quiet to accompany me. The type of quiet that makes it possible for me to hear the scratching of my pen as it skittles across my paper journal. The echo from the chimes on our mechanical clock as it strikes each quarter of the hour. The soft clicking sound as the pendulum swings back and forth in its glassed-enclosed case. A cricket. The sound of my breath as it escapes from my nose. The gentle landing of my porcelain coffee cup as I place it back down on a ceramic coaster. And I am pretty sure my thinking is making the same sounds of a flat rock skipping across the water of a resting pond. Sometimes ending with a thud, and other times three, seven, nineteen skips in a row until it sinks.

“To listen to the silence, wherever you are, is an easy and direct way of becoming present. Even if there is noise, there is always some silence underneath and in between the sounds. Listening to the silence immediately creates stillness inside you.”

Eckhart Tolle

Quiet is a choice. Quiet delivers an awareness that can only be made possible if you are present. I can’t imagine starting my day in any other way. Waking to moments of silence allows me to hear with a kind of energy that is untouched by the noise from a world I can’t control. Alfred Brendel got it right when he shared, “The word Listen contains the same letters as the word Silent.”

Take a moment. Take an hour! Listen to your quiet and capture it. These are the moments when we hear the loudest, all of those things that make it possible for a natural calm to come into our world!

“To be aware of little, quiet things, you need to be quiet inside. A high degree of alertness is required. Be still. Look. Listen. Be present.”

Eckhart Tolle

Talk soon…

G