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A House of Silence
Midcoast Friends Meeting; Damariscotta, ME
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Some twenty years ago, an interfaith retreat house opened outside the city where I served as a clergyperson. I decided to take my yearly 8-day silent retreat there. During most of the retreat, and leaving shortly before I did, was a woman observing total silence, also. We were the only two in the retreat building. I had never met her. We never talked with each other, not one word; my recall is our eyes met once, and we shared a smile.
Upon leaving, the other retreatant left a message with the site co-owner. She wanted him to tell me how much I had helped her during the retreat. Her comment surprised me. I had no idea.
Anyone who lives a life of spiritual contemplation long enough comes to know what people call communication is a thin surface of unexplored, fathomless depths. These depths need not, however, be understood, which would be a futile effort anyway. Here, however, what we cannot comprehend, and may feel somewhat threatening initially to our sense of self, can be known and received as a gift.
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So, we will not learn of this communication in writings about good communication. This sharing is beyond what goes by "good communication," for it is before such. This sharing between the woman and I is before ego, outside time and technique. This sharing is without a strategy, a how-to; it is a spontaneous expression of pure presence.
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The sharing of spirit-with-spirit is intangible. "Intangible" literally means "not able to be touched." So, Zen poet Ikkyu (Japan 15th Century) says:
rice boils in my broken-footed iron pot
it's everything but you can't taste it
You can taste rice, but not its everything. In rice is everything, and one taste can open the gate to Nowhere.
While you can smell a scent, you cannot touch it. You can taste a taste but not hold it in your hand. You can think of your friend but not put your arms around the thought or share coffee or tea with it. You can kiss your beloved, but you cannot kiss the love that inspires the kiss. What is most important is hidden.
Intangible communication is sharing apart from words or other gestures. Words and gestures are most faithful to our nature when they come out of the silence of our true selves. This truest is so, for our true self, underlying the costume of individuality, is a single self, one presence presenting itself in the guise of our faces and lives.
Relaxing into Nowhere, intangible heart-of-things, we relax into a space where we communicate first by being, not doing. We know the other, yet we cannot say what we know or how. Through that one face, we can see everything. We do, we just do not know we do, or rarely do. But we do.
Ikkyu, again -
some monks live in caves build huts on snowy mountains
right now clouds flee across the moon my heart
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*©Brian K. Wilcox, 2025
*Quotes of Ikkyu; Stephen Berg, Trans. Ikkyu: Crow With No Mouth: 15th Century Zen Master.
*Brian's book, An Ache for Union: Poems on Oneness with God through Love, can be ordered through major online booksellers or the publisher AuthorHouse.
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