Sometimes, it's better to just keep your mouth
shut. Looking out at a landscape,
silence is apparently golden, at least in C. S. Lewis' book.
"Again, you have stood
before some landscape, which seems to embody what you have been looking for all
your life; and then turned to the friend at your side who appears to be seeing
what you saw -- but at the first words a
gulf yawns between you, and you realise that this landscape means something
totally different to him, that he is pursuing an alien vision and cares nothing
for the ineffable suggestion by which you are transported." (1)
I've felt the gulf before - it’s a kind of alien and
alienating aloneness. It's frustrating
because it's not necessarily fix-able. We
human beings do not like giving up. I
certainly do not like admitting that there are things that I simply cannot fix. Frustrating.
On the flip side, when we're lucky, that gulf moment
can mark the birth of something new.
"Are not all lifelong
friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who
has some inkling (but faint and uncertain even in the best) of that something
which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and
in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year
by year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for,
listening for?" (2)
I've stood beside friends who have seen what I'm seeing,
heard what I hear, understood what I could not articulate and communicated that
shared understanding wisely and wordlessly.
Silence can be uncomfortable. Silence can be long. Silence can be difficult. I'm holding on to the silence. I want a silence that
can be shared, the silence that can look out over the valleys and mountains
that surround us, here on our little hemisphere, and need say nothing.
(1) C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain.
(2) C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain.
Image 1 - http://33.media.tumblr.com/f97b3f63dfebc992532895075676a89e/tumblr_mwus8fygkh1rk65tvo1_500.jpg
Image 3 - http://www.jwmphotographyonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/mt-magazine-feet-over-cliff.jpg
Image 3 - http://www.jwmphotographyonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/mt-magazine-feet-over-cliff.jpg
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