Silence

a short note

Be careful. The moment you start talking you create a verbal universe, a universe of words, ideas, concepts and abstractions, interwoven and interdependent, most wonderfully generating, supporting and explaining each other and yet all without essence or substance, mere creations of the mind. Words create words, reality is silent.

—Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, from I AM THAT

I had an article ready to go, but it hasn’t felt quite ready to send out. That’s probably because I’ve felt pulled in some radically different directions lately, and my inner weather has been shifting from one day to the next—one day feeling a sense of freedom, relief, joy and lightness beyond anything I usually feel, and the next day something darker and more akin to depression shows up interspersed with moments of unexpected grief. My fingerbiting compulsion disappears for days and then returns with a vengeance.

Trying to sort this out by thinking only creates confusion and knots of tension. I know the only way through is to be silent, to open and let go, to drop into the heart, to allow the tangle to untangle itself and whatever is struggling to emerge or trying to clarify itself to do so in its own time. It feels like the wrong moment to publish something.

I don’t actually have a schedule for publishing Substack articles, but it seems a natural pattern has emerged lately of putting something out every Wednesday night or Thursday morning, which is why I’m writing this brief note to let you know there might be a week or two of silence. Then again, I might be sending out a new article in a few days. Who knows?

But right now, I’m being pulled to sit down, be still and keep quiet.

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Afterword:

I published a short clarification of this message the next day called “A Few Words from the silence” that you can read HERE.

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For all my previous articles on Substack, see my Substack home page: joantollifson.substack.com.

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with Love to all…