Healthy Silence

The base note of our lives is silence. The trees must be in it, the birds sing, the dogs bark, cars beep – people speak – but the silence is the deep ground. – Marie Howe

The beauty, grandeur and health restoration of silence is foreign to most people. Rush, busy, hurry, drive, are friends to most people.

The pace, the distractions, the noise, the need for stimulus is so great people need more and more. More time on the cell phone, louder music, more shock in movies, more addictive intensity. Just more and never less.

Only a few of us experience the beauty of poetry that leads us to treasure healthy silence.

Healthy silence is the silence leading to serene peace. Unhealthy silence is a tool to punish people. Cutting people off is not healthy.

Poet Wendell Berry shows us the ways to healthy silence. Thank you, Mr. Berry, for this precious gift; THE PEACE OF WILD THINGS.

When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world and am free.

Keys to Healthy Silence

1. Turn unhealthy emotions into silence.
2. Don’t tax your mind with forethought of grief.
3. Think about wild things & still waters.
4. Delight in the grace of the world.
5. Rest in your freedom.

Silence is a gift. Silence is a treasure. Silence is the narrow, single-lane road to finding rest with God.