Silence

I like the radio but I am also quite happy with a room in silence and more often than not I'll leave it that way - radio off. But today making bread in the kitchen I decided to put on Radio 4. The news of events in Libya came to a close and a program called Soul Music commenced. The programme is described as 'Exploring the impact that Estonian composer Arvo Pärt's piece for piano and violin Spiegel im Spiegel has had on people's lives'. As the program began I was almost immediately moved, not just by the story being told but by the triggering of my own stories by the music, I began to wonder about a whole different set of feelings which the piece might trigger. But this soon passed as the meditative quality of the piece expanded. Dave C came in and I asked him for a comment on the music. Yes, he liked it. I offered that 'for me it evokeds unfolding stillness, and that is the paradox'. How is it that stillness unfolds? Dave C then explained that Spiegel im Spiegel means mirror in the mirror. I did not know this and was taken to my own experience sitting zazen, which I have described as 'like two mirrors facing each other'. Yet some thing else is present in the piece; a sense of loss or of a gap between where we seem to be and where we might like to be. For me this can capture the losses I've experienced in life but also a sort of yearning to return home. The same yearning evoked for me by Vaughan Williams' The Lark Ascending. And I do see this as a spiritual yearning to return home, to the source. And yet at the same time there is this wanting to be in form, in the world, and this seems part of a paradox; a kind of gap. My friend and 'spiritual yardstick' RM Mugo has told me 'there are no gaps'. I am sure she is right but at my level of experience it seems that there are, but they get filled by the falling into them. This falling, for everything is to some extent falling or changing, seems to be the world, experience unfolding; life. Listening to the comments and stories of people in the program it seemed that a common spiritual understanding was somehow held by all who spoke.

Last night an acquittance said in passing that he loved silence. I thought 'yes, and however much noise there is, it is always silent'. I seem to recall a post on RM Mugo's blog Jade Mountains, pointing for me, to the way everything is cut through with silence. Searching for the post I find, as might be expected many references to silence. Arvo Pärt's piece for piano and violin Spiegel im Spiegel, seems to take people beyond the stories and into the unfolding silence holding the stories, and in that holding to compassion.