Out of Silence

“I’ve wanted to be a writer ever since I could remember.”

That is the opening line of a play I first wrote and directed in college, C. Writ 101. The experts say to write what you know; accordingly, my main characters have always been extreme logophiles. So deep and fervent is my love of words and their ways that, ironically, I can hardly find words to express it. Dylan Thomas comes close:

“I fell in love — that is the only expression I can think of — at once, and am still at the mercy of words, though sometimes now, knowing a little of their behavior very well, I think I can influence them slightly and have even learned to beat them now and then, which they appear to enjoy.”   (“Poetic Manifesto”, published in Texas Quarterly, Winter 1961)

Dorothy Sayers shared my affinity, if this conversation between two of her main characters is any evidence:

“‘Do you find it easy to get drunk on words?’

‘So easy that, to tell you the truth, I am seldom perfectly sober.'”  (Gaudy Night)

I have spent the better part of thirty years writing or planning to write. I knew I loved words. I knew I wanted to be an author. More than that, I wanted to be a storyteller, crafting words into vessels that would share with others the wonder and joy that words always brought to me.

Somewhere along the way, however, I realized that the world around me was rather inundated with words. From magazine headlines in grocery store lines to Spotify ads every ten minutes to cell phone conversations in restaurants, subways, and national parks, words had seeped into every corner of society. This seemed annoying and, at times, mildly ominous; then, in October 2013, I went away for a solitary weekend retreat and read Henri Nouwen’s The Way of the Heart. “Mildly ominous” became “apocolyptically devastating,” and I began to mourn the slow loss of a world that was drowning in noise.

Nouwen laid bare that about which I was subconsciously uneasy:

“ . . . words, my own included, have lost their creative power. Their limitless multiplication has made us lose confidence in words and caused us to think, more often than not, ‘They are just words.’ ”

“The main result of this is that the main function of the word, which is communication, is no longer realized. The word no longer communicates, no longer fosters communion, no longer creates community, and therefore no longer gives life.”

This tiny book shook my wordy soul to its very foundations. I realized that, in many ways, I was not merely an ignorant, acquiescent bystander in the ongoing destruction of the word; nay, I looked in my own hand and found a hardened hammer. I shuddered when I thought of how often I had welcomed the deluge of words and cheerfully lost myself in the distraction, the bewitchment, the self-absorbed complacency of our whirling dervish of a world.

I began then to take tiny steps – faltering, stumbling, baby-Bambi-on-a-frozen-lake steps – towards the cultivation of quiet in my own soul. My hope was to reclaim one infinitesimal speck of the power of the word and then, as an author, multiply the quiet and the power by sharing with others. However, I have recently come to the troubling realization that a new author cannot be a “quiet” author. To be heard, one must not only add one’s voice to the cacophonous choir already clamoring for attention; indeed, one must shout louder than any. Just when I was coming to the conclusion that it would be healthy and desirable (for me, at any rate) to turn my back on social media and other affirmation-seeking platforms, I found that my lifelong dreams would be well-nigh impossible without them. Authors need a website. They should have Facebook pages and Twitter accounts. They must – I repeat, MUST – have a blog.

Ergo, here we are. I do not intend to abandon my journey into the hidden power of silence, nor my search for the lost power of the word. Instead, I hope to make this blog part of the adventure, inviting all who wish to share in both the triumphs and the tears. May these electronic pages become a fertile field where true communication can be cultivated, that the word in all of us may be nourished into new and vibrant blossoming.

I chose the name from another Nouwen quote, a few pages further on in The Way of the Heart:

“A word with power is a word that comes out of silence. A word that bears fruit is a word that emerges from the silence and returns to it.”

Thank you for joining me.