Silence

I like silence, sometimes I look for it, there are periods where silence becomes the only medicine. You have to have courage to be silent, it is much easier to turn on the radio or rv or listen to a piece of music, I am attracted to it...but for a period of my life I feared it.
Then I discovered that it is a very powerful energy. Respecting this energy puts peace in our hearts. Just try to sit in meditation or in a chair, and perhaps we will discover that silence does not exist. We can hear the gurgling of our intestines and stomach, our heartbeat, the circulatory system of our blood, the waves of our thoughts... in short, everything becomes an orchestra playing its own music... but thanks to silence, to the magic of silence, we are able to listen. And when we are in this grace we also use the sounds that come from outside, and so everything blends into one sound. When we relate to the internal and external sounds, our way of perceiving, of listening attentively, our emotional state changes. It becomes calm. Silence is the basis of meditation.
In meditation, listening becomes an active form of attention to sounds. Silence amplifies listening. This reminds me of an anecdote. To give the listening of silence in a scene of a film, he suggested to the director to use the flight of a fly inside an empty room and I remember that as if by magic ... everything became silent. Sometimes the barking of a dog in the countryside amplifies the silence, helps us to hear it more.
There are many other sounds that we do not perceive, for example, animals have a greater range of hearing than we do, and are able to hear sounds that we do not perceive, such as bats, whales and many others.
Bats use a complex system of sound waves to move around and especially to hunt. Dolphins can emit, and above all hear, sounds above 200,000 hz while elephants use very low frequencies, below our lower limit in some ritualistic forms and also in mating.
But what if we could hear everything, we would most likely not be able to stand this mix of sounds. And in fact our ears seem to protect and defend us from sounds that could be very invasive.
We live immersed in noise: at work, at home, even on the street, we are always accompanied by a background of words, buzzing, road and traffic sounds. Sometimes I wake up early in the morning at around 4.30am and silence reigns supreme in all its splendour, but as dawn approaches, we slowly start to hear 'the noise of the world', people are setting off for work.... and like a fade-out... from silence we move on to noise.

Unfortunately, we are so used to noise, that silence seems lifeless to us, even frightening.

Silence, on the other hand, is waiting to be discovered: it calms the frenetic activity of the mind and brings us to inner stillness. Silence is perhaps the highest form of communication, that with oneself - because it brings us into contact with our inner self, with our intimacy with the essence of ourselves.
Silence is a form of spiritual discipline, especially in Eastern philosophies, Buddhism, Hinduism, as I was saying before, we are thinking of meditation, but it is also at the basis of Catholicism, in many monasteries the rule of silence applies, a beautiful documentary "The Great Silence" comes to mind.

But how do we bring silence into everyday life?
I often go to parks, or churches, and I concentrate
On my breath, letting thoughts melt away like snow in the sun. In the car, I don't turn on the radio, and at home neither radio nor TV....silence cleanses and nourishes the mind...it gives energy and the will to do, it is a natural restorative.
This poem by Mariangela Gualtieri encapsulates all the preciousness of Silence.

Silence is golden

because it inflames the hours

prepares the escape and

leads through mysterious lands.

It is golden and this gold

lies beneath all the noise

in a burning din

as a treasure buried inside

and sought elsewhere.

From the collection "bestia di gioia", by Mariangela Gualtieri, Giulio Einaudi Editore

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)