Episode 134 - Silences

Cold, Dusk, Silence...

The Thursday Thesis – 17/1/2019

Listen.

Can you hear it?

Just there – in between words and slid between the burble electronic s. Do you hear it?

That’s where the magick lives, where the world of noise ends and the otherworld begins.

Silence.

Once upon a time I believed that silence was a simple thing, it was just a lack of sound, and absence of something.

These days I understand that Silence itself has a peculiar substance all of it s own. There’s a texture to Silence, but you have to reach into the quietness to fell the distinctions between absence of sound and Silence.

There is a difference.

Silence is the rich, smooth and infinite darkness of sounds: the endless black onto which sounds are played, like the dark screen on which images are made to dance.

And every silence is its own thing, distinct and different to its noiseless neighbour.

The silence of your warm bedroom is not the same as the silence in a graveyard at 3 am.

The silence after the storm is a lifetime away from the heavy, pressing air that came before the bellow of thunder.

The belligerent hostility of silence after a row is unlike the Silence that mourns a lost love.
And there is no silence like the loss of a child.

As a musician I think of Silence as the other half of the music – the space in which the sound finds its breath, gathers its energy and collects its thoughts.

I ask my students to play beautiful silences...

Silence – which is something more than just quiet time – is life’s breathing space: Silence is where we listen to the spaces between the sounds, gather our own energies and shepherd our headstrong and wayward thoughts.

Where will you find the beautiful silences in your day, today?

© Neil Cowmeadow 2019
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