A Friend of Silence

Walking to Belfast Friends Meeting yesterday, I looked down Union Street toward the horizon to what seemed an impenetrable matte-white cloud bank below which a sliver of arctic blue sky offered itself. I stopped and reached out my hand as if to peel back the clouds to reveal just a bit more of that blue — like an addict or an explorer. That blue. I was grinning ear to ear. Before my brain kicked in, I had a moment of delight and maybe contentment. There is no life that I know of made up of just these moments, no stringing them together seamlessly — they may well be these moments in contrast to the business of our lives. But we can reflect and cultivate and hold space for moments just as we do for laundry or scraping the car of ice.

In my grief, after my husband’s unexpected death over a year ago, I moved to Maine. At first, I characterized the move as a writing residency but have now been here nearly 5 months and haven’t written much at all. I seem bent on making friends and chasing endorphins up mountains. Maybe even mindfully making friends who want to chase endorphins up mountains. I am collecting moments both alone and with new friends as we hike the Midcoast and Acadia ranges. These are not necessarily quiet moments though coming upon a lichen field in bloom during winter does still the breath. There are summits and lookouts of course, but also the unexpected finds such as ice flowers, rippling mirror worlds in ponds, micro-rivers under thin sheets of ice, echoes in a quarry, birdsong out of nowhere in the dead of winter, the array of colors in alpine granite — these moments compel me to repeat the sounding joy with my whole self, whether in community or solo. Along with my grief, I am becoming comfortable again — present in silliness, laughter, awe, and silence.

In my childhood, our family belonged to one of the larger Friends Meetings in Philadelphia. We also attended the Friends school attached to the Meeting and thus we grew up in the tenants of Quakerism. We children, my three brothers and I, were introduced to silence early. We were wary of it, being rambunctious free-rangers of Price Street and the Wissahickon beyond, beholden only to a bell rung by our Mother from the front porch to bring us back for supper. However, we were taught to respect the shared silence or at least to live with it quietly each Thursday and Sunday. Silence was a fact of life.

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