Fast of Words

I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.
--Henry David Thoreau

In my family, I am the talker, the storyteller. I have always been compelled to entertain with my gift of gab. With my mobile face and energetic gestures, I can be a one-woman show. It gets downright exhausting sometimes. So on a recent spiritual retreat, I felt an instant sense of relief when the leader announced that we would be in silence.

Silence, for me has often been something inflicted, a punishment or banishment, a withdrawal of emotional warmth: "the silent treatment." But this was not a punishment. Instead, it would be 'fasting from words,' a phrase coined by Henri Nouwen in The Way of the Heart, something cleansing, purifying. Much to my surprise, I welcomed silence like water on a desert hike. When I told my husband about my joy meeting silence, he was also surprised. A quiet man in the best of mood, he is in a constant fast from words, except in the morning, when I do not want to talk. And sometimes I suffer in his silence, misreading it as a withdrawal of love, as I did when my mother sent me to room to think about what I'd done wrong.

I grew up in a mostly quiet house. The brown shag carpet, earth-toned upholstery and abstract paintings cast a cool shadow over everything as my mother wrestled with her private demons, sometimes talking to herself aloud in the shower or in her bedroom. Sometimes my parents listened to music, but it was sad music to my young ears, like Joan Baez, singing about the war in Vietnam. Anti-war politics was the soundtrack in our house. Our dinner conversations usually began with my father ranting about Berkeley-in-the-60s politics, as he fielded urgent phone calls about who needed bailing out of jail for refusing to be drafted, who had gone underground, who the FBI was watching, that suspicious van on our street that neighbors suspected was full of wire tapping equipment, or when the Black Panthers would be coming to our house to hold a meeting. These were not times to protect children from potentially scary stories. We were treated as little adults.

Then silence would descend over the table. That's when I would grow animated. Talking was a way of bridging our private loneliness, sometimes frantically trying to lift the energy gathered around our egg-shaped white laminate table. When I wasn't talking, I was writing. I spent much time filling journals, mostly trying to figure out what made my mother tick, what ailed her and how I might fill the hole of her own deficient childhood.

I loved to talk. I knew how to make my father laugh, or even cry. One time, after my first child was born, I told my father a story that made him faint. It was right after my son was born and the delivery was dramatic, complete with an emergency c-section and general anesthetic. It wasn't a bloody story, but apparently I conveyed all the loss of control and fear that experienced. With my little 10-day-old baby asleep at my side, my parents listened intently. My father grew annoyed, said he felt sick, told me to stop. I did. We stood to leave and he fell over like a tree onto the floor. Now that's a powerful story, he later told me.

While my chattiness has always been a stand against silence, a incessant attempt to heal the darkness that threatened to envelop my home, here in the woods, in the cozy lodge, silence was a gift, not a punishment. We ate in silence and far from awkward, it was musical; the clink of the silverware on the plates, the whisper of chairs sliding out as we served ourselves more food. My mouth was full of taste and scent. In the woods, during meditative walks, golden light fell through the trees and sound emanated from everything. Even light has a sound. I could hear the glimmering of the spiderwebs in the sunlight. I joke with my kids that I can hear so much better when I put my glasses on, but here in silence, it was true: Silence reveals.

Silence is space. The first time I experienced this space, I was in high school -- arguably the most chatty time in life -- on a 24-day survival course in the Sierra Nevada wilderness. We hiked over 200 miles, carrying heavy packs, twice for 24 hours straight, rock climbed and struggled to cooperate with people, some of whom we never liked in school and even less out there in the wilderness. In the middle of all that was solo. It was meant to be a vision quest, which I was cynical about for years until I realized solo was the most life-changing three days of my young life. During this fast from words, human contact and food, I saw no one and heard no human voice -- not even my own until the second day.

I had sworn I would not speak aloud as that would surely mean I'd lost my mind. But when I found myself anxious that it might rain and my mind raced ahead to hypothermia, I made up a little Winnie-the-Pooh-like poem: It's nice to know that if it rains, I'll be okay. I repeated this, while I rocked back and forth on a granite slab that overlooked a deep ravine. There above the tree line, I could hear the wind rushing through the trees below. As my voice calmed me, three deer ascended high plateau. They stood there, not 30 feet from me, a buck, a doe and a fawn. I froze. They froze. But I soon realized that they had come when I was rocking and speaking, as though I'd called them. I resumed my rocking and quietly mouthed my simple poem. They began grazing around me. Every few minutes, the doe and I locked eyes.

This story floated back to me during my silent retreat, reminding me as the deer once did that I am never alone, no matter how solitary. Though I will always be a social being, thriving on stories and the company of others, I know that there is nothing more restorative than silence. It is only in silence that we can really hear, see and feel -- which is perhaps also the reason we avoid it. You never know what will come up. But I fear it less and crave it more. After all, something wild, something magical might come up.

At the end of my weekend retreat, I returned home, excited to tell my husband all my discoveries about silence. I even find a way to turn silence into a story. But something else happened, too. At least in the immediate afterglow of my silent retreat, I did not feel so much pressure to speak. I became a better listener. I was able to hear those I love and in doing that, see them as they are. Not as I want them to be or remember them being, but as they are right now. That is the first act of love.