When I was a kid, I used to stare out the car windows as we traveled swiftly along, straining to grasp the import of passing objects, like rusting trucks in a farm field, or a strange billboard, or why an individual with a ponderous backpack shouldered his or her way along the sun-baked road alone. It was difficult to speak about these things to my sister or my parents while traveling so quickly, for by the time I felt I’d absorbed the sight adequately and wanted to open my mouth and give utterance, the thing had passed, and new things came forward to command the attention. The same principle applies to one’s understandings as one travels through the days, which do seem so quickly to pass. By the time you think you comprehend something, new revelation emerges. There are many times in the midst of discoursing on one’s theories when new ones spring forth without regard for the careful construction of previous comprehension. Better in those instances to take the example of the child traveler and, as deeper insight prevails, allow better words to germinate in quietude.
So much of real value is said in silence. As with a good haiku, because they are almost always more a question than an answer, an observation rather than a pronouncement, the silences it contains leave an open gate through which continue to flow new currents of revelation. All such speech is precious and healing.
If speech comes down over one like a heavy cloud, or even speech which tickles one’s fixations of old, then it is dead speech that’s musty with past ignorance and superstition. It’s like the effluvia of the waste-bucket, then, and better let it rush on by to be spent in the ditch along the road one travels. Even the ancient burdens with which one yet journeys have more to say than the peddler of self-serving rhetoric. The hawkers of petty notions would have one believe that through crusty old fictions one may throw down the crutch or leap up from the sick-bed and be healed. Their avid listeners remain tragically suffocated in the shallow waters of cherished delusion.
Now, this very moment, the whole vast sea surges about one, and one is immersed in this sonic robe of living truth, which unfolds in symphonies of splendid light and sound within one’s own expanding consciousness, if one can but let it be so. The falsehoods are like flotsam. But even this in time is churned and tossed until it resumes its native matter, that of the sea itself.
Although there may be some truth that resonates beyond and through these words, yet because this writer is still a traveler on time’s road there must remain some undissolved substance that stubbornly resists the inevitable ocean. Be warned then and take heed as streams of insipid deception pour forth battered into raucous sound and fury by unmoving stones of cherished attachments: The wise love silence, for the journey is, veritably, swifter than light itself.
