Silence ...

What is silence??? And what is our connection with it???
Silence could have a different meaning for different human beings...
While to a child it could mean minimum of noise that doesn't break Mom's
disturbance barrier, to a mother silence becomes urgency, difficult to
maintain as she goes about her daily chores over the sleeping
infant... Between lovers silence could vary from an affectionate
communion to going speechless with emotion over inability to express
their hurt... In couples it could mean a sulky standoff or a cold war
or a mutual understanding as they feel totally at ease in

togetherness... To a warrior or a soldier, silence could be both a
premonition of a looming attack and a truce with the enemy...
Is silence mere noiselessness???
Can absence of noise be called silence???
When a teacher raps her class to hush and says, "Silence, please!"
Does she mean silence or merely asks them to sit quiet???
There have been times when I have encountered silence in the
disturbingly chirpy sounds of birds at dusk...
There were moments when I glimpsed deep silence among the blaring
horns of the rush hour traffic in the Capital...
Ever heard the silence in a musical note???
Silence, it appears, has no persona of its own except what one's mind
gives it...
Thus we have bestowed many adjectives on silence... Stony silence,
disturbing silence, deathly silence, impregnable silence, hushed
silence, pregnant silence, musical silence…
But this is only in the material world... When we rise above the
earthly silence, we move towards a silence that needs no adjectives...
It is just silence—deep, enriching, absolute... This silence alone has
meaning, where one becomes silence itself... Rest all becomes
redundant...
It is amazing how eloquent could silence be...
And humans, it seems, have an intimate connection with it...
It keeps coming to us in many mysterious ways... Somewhere deep down,
in the farthest recesses of our consciousness, we have a deep
connection with it...
We are unable to understand it or reach it, probably because between
silence and us we have erected multi-dimensional walls...
We almost try to deny silence, which is the core of our being, even defy it...
In fact, most of us seem to be quite comfortable with noise...
We seem to fight silence… and even defeat it…
For don't we announce our arrival in this world with a loud, piercing
wail...???

--
hamza ..