Came across a supposed quote from the ancient Chinese seer Confucius<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“A seed grows with no sound, but a tree falls with a huge noise. Destruction has noise, but creation is quiet. This is the power of silence, grow silently”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It\u2019s a striking passage, even if it isn\u2019t actually Confucius. It reads more like a modern proverb shaped to sound ancient, but that doesn\u2019t diminish the “hmm interesting” that it
elicited in me. What\u2019s compelling is the metaphor: creation as quiet persistence, destruction as spectacle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Silence is often where the real work begins. Seeds germinate in darkness. Muscles grow during rest. Ideas form in the long, uneventful spaces between distractions. Yet our culture rewards the loud moments, the announcement, the crisis, the collapse, the reveal, far more than the long, slow cultivation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I’m sensing a kind of imbalance, we treat \u201cnoise\u201d as life\u2019s proof of aliveness, when often it\u2019s the opposite. Noise can be a way to avoid sitting with ourselves. A buffer against the unfamiliar or the uncomfortable. A constant filling of the internal space where creation could be taking shape.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The invitation in that quote is simple and subversive:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What happens when you step out of the current? What grows when nothing is pulling on you?
Silence isn\u2019t the absence of life, it\u2019s just a different home for it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There\u2019s also a beautiful paradox: when you allow yourself some quiet time, you often start to notice the subtler noises you\u2019ve been drowning out, the hum of your own thoughts, the way ideas drift into awareness and dissolve, the raw texture of attention itself. That\u2019s where things begin.
I wonder do my Cousin Andy White’s songs begin in silence? My stories do, silence is the space my words dance in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If you followed the quote\u2019s advice, if you went silent for a while, what kind of creation do you imagine might rise from that?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I consider the power of silence as the space where creation happens <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":180,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-179","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-life","category-musings"],"yoast_head":"\n