Headphones Off
Photo by Ilyuza Mingazova on Unsplash
After many weeks of long-winded posts, and because this weekly newsletter just happens to fall on US Election Day, it’s time for something short. But hopefully still in line with my aim in Theology & Therapy posts: to encourage, comfort, challenge, and make you think. Or more to the point of the following poem, to invite you to take your headphones off and listen.
Headphones Off
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Budding noise in your head, Sound obstructs sounding Of the seas in your heart.
Buzz saws The size of nerves Silences silence where Thoughts like lice Hatch and scratch.
Crickets in the brain With bow-like wings Rings the crick In your neck, No tilting head To hear The creek run dry, Empty, empty, empty.
Formless the void, void of form, Foam waves In and out, Wave away The wave-like Particular dark, Formless shadows foaming
Against the tide of light: Sounds the deep With sun of silence.
Quote from Bruno Barnhart
“There is a darkness, an unknowing at the heart of poetry. Classical ages trim the wilderness to a garden, immobilize the swift and living animals in stone. Our modern poets have gone into the dark woods again. Their obscure speech at its truest is the enigmatic babble of the prophet, the holy madman. The breath of poetry is inseparable from this mystery, which remains as ground. This is the incircumscribable wholeness that we systematically exclude as we perfect our edifice of civilization, our prison-house of consciousness, our rational city of enlightened human progress.”1
Question
Do you make time and space for silence? How? When? Where? What gets in the way? What gifts has silence given you?
1 Bruno Barnhart, Second Simplicity: The Inner Shape of Christianity, 132.