Inner Life

Initiatory Silence

by Martin Shaw

For fifteen minutes a day we can think straight. For fifteen minutes we can extract ourselves from enchantment and communicate something more than a trance state. I once knew a poet who claimed all his poems were just those fifteen minutes sewn together. Within fairy tales, silence can have a variety of qualities and is substantial in its power and influence. When words are formed, they come from the pathos of the weight of the space around them. It’s a dimension that religious orders and mystical folk the world over understand.

I know a young African girl who deliberately goes into silence once a week for a full day, to steady herself. Confirm her own fundament. It’s to do with a certain deliberateness, a kind of you of the soul. It’s not secrecy but privacy. We get thinned out without it, and much easier to fool. It invokes a limit to assist sufficient deepening. Silence in initiatory circumstance is rarely passive: it is a gathering in. Silence in this arrangement is fidelity to the deep interior, an end to chatter and the push-pull of the market square. It is a kind of virginity. It is the end of influence.

Such a silence gathers up gleams of light from the Otherworld in the folds of its skirt.. It’s a quality I see in my mother, and it’s impossible I step in and out of it myself on a good day. A quality of incubation before potent birthing of language. There is a hysteria to constant verbal communication that bleeds our words of heft. The trill of banter that eventually fills our mouth with feathers not corn.