Love and Silence

I was asked a question recently by someone I shall call Katniss and the question was: How do you love someone and not act it out?

Love, Katniss, like silence and stillness has many textures. I can love this person and feel a deep emotion and attachment for them and not act it out because there is no need to. In meditation there can be silence and stillness. Just as there is love between this person and myself, there is also a silence. 

With an understanding that love and silence have textures, let us look further into them.

Katniss, at the moment the love you have with your person is like music from Beethoven. There isn’t much silence at all. It is noisy and busy, dramatic, energetic and restless. It is only in the moments in which Beethoven manages to draw breath that there is much silence and Beethoven isn’t much into drawing breath.

Selina and I are an old couple. We’ve been together for almost ten years. We have silence. Our silence is the silence that happens between thoughts. Whilst we are busy and loud and passionate, there is still an observable silence between Selina and myself. If you think there isn’t a silence and stillness between us it is because you haven’t looked closely enough. Our silence and stillness is that of a love that knows that we can trust each other completely. Our love and silence is completely still, which is why you’ve most likely missed it. Our love and silence have no compulsive need to do anything. They simply either stand to one side, or if there is a job that needs doing, they get it done and then return to stillness.

In meditation the mind can become very still. There is the simile of a deer in a forest. The mind becomes very silent and very skittish. Our minds are afraid of their own silence. We aren’t used to silence and often don’t know what to do with it.

The same is true of love.

When meditation deepens the mind realises that it quite likes this silence. When you love someone and the love is returned, after a while you realise that you like loving and being loved. I believe Katniss that you are learning this at the moment.

Katniss with this other person the love is different. Our silence and stillness is that of something that is not yet born. We’ve tried a different love in the past and it hasn’t been terribly successful. The texture of our love and silence is one of expectation. In some ways our love is like a building storm. We both know it is there. We have both feel the rising humidity, but lightning has yet to strike and shatter the silence and whatever thunder is being heard, it is distant and likely unrelated to our storm. We both know that our storm may never be more than gathering clouds and rising humidity with distant thunder.

Yet, our love, like true silence, is not unrequited. Katniss, often it is the love and silences that are unmolested by words that are the greatest. I’m lucky, I have two of both.