Lessons of Silence

Earlier this week, as I was finishing Adeline Yen Mah’s book, Watching the Tree, a collection of insights into Chinese culture and philosophy which includes her own reflections on happiness, tradition, and spiritual wisdom, I came to a chapter titled “Lessons of Silence.”

In this chapter Yen Mah examines her relationship to silence and the lessons that it has taught her over the years, recalling a conversation that she had years earlier with her grandfather about one of the scrolls that hung on the wall above his bed.

On that scroll were four words–“ The lessons of silence”–written by Lao Zi in the Tao Te Ching.

More than fifty years after her grandfather suggested that one day she might discover the importance of silence, she reflects on what silence has taught her:

“Writing has obliged me to spend long hours searching for those voices which we never hear except when our inner self is at peace and everything else is suspended.”

And this:

“...it seems to me as if our youngsters are fearful of stillness, and are attempting to avoid certain emotions that only descend with the sound of silence.”

And this:

“...sometimes, in the hush late at night or with the dew of early dawn, there suddenly unfolds a special element of serenity. And it is often at these moments that we ask ourselves whether we are hearing in the silence the whispers of our innermost being.”

The whispers of our innermost being.

Many years after her conversation with her grandfather, standing in the silent stillness that she finds atop the summit of a sacred mountain in China, Yen Mah comes across the words that she first saw as a child on her grandfather’s wall.

They are accompanied by another row of words which are new to her: “The lessons of silence are peerless and are unmatched by anything else under Heaven.”

These words help her listen more closely to “the majestic hush of the early morning air...” and to understand in a startling revelation “... what my Ye Ye was trying to say so many years ago.”

In our work, as Yen Mah reminds us, we must search diligently for silence rather than seek ways to escape it if we are to hear the whispers of our innermost being.

For more information about Adeline Yen Mah and her work, visit:
http://www.adelineyenmah.com/index2.html

To read interviews with her, visit:
http://www.writerswrite.com/childrens/yenma.htm
http://www.harpercollins.com/author/authorExtra.aspx?authorID=26575&displayType=interview

Drawing Words From Your Inner Well

In Adeline Yen Mah’s Watching the Tree, she recounts her experience after graduating from London Hospital Medical School of treating Philip Larkin, the English poet, who was nearly forty at the time, “a balding man who worried about everything, with anxious, intelligent eyes behind thick glasses.”

Years later, while working on Watching the Tree in the public library on Brompton Road in London’s Earls Court, she found herself staring at a volume above her desk containing Larkin’s letters. Out of curiosity, she took down the volume and flipped through it.

What’s interesting about the excerpt below from one of the letters, aside from the inclusion of Dr. Yen Mah’s name, is Larkin’s explanation of his approach to writing poetry:

“She [Dr. Yen] keeps asking how one writes poetry, how one manages the beats and rhymes. I say that is the easiest part. The hardest part is having something to write about that succeeds in drawing words from your inner mind–that is very important, as one can always think of subjects, but they have to matter in that peculiar way that produces words and some kind of development of thought or theme, or else there’s no poem either in thought or words.”

Larkin’s observations applies, I think, to prose as well as poetry, fiction as well as non-fiction. What you write must matter to you... in such a way that it draws out words from your inner mind, your inner well.

If the words refuse to come, or if you’re finding it hard to write, perhaps the reason is because you haven’t looked hard enough or deeply enough or long enough inside yourself for what matters most to you.

The next time you find yourself facing a blank page, ask yourself what matters to you... and see if the answer to that question helps draw the words out of your inner mind, your inner well.

For more on writing what matters, visit:
http://news.stanford.edu/news/2009/march11/playwright-octavio-solis-031109.html
http://www.copyblogger.com/why-you-write/
http://www.redroom.com/blog/larry-r-smith/a-writers-statement-writing-what-matters
http://therumpus.net/2009/09/rebecca-solnit-on-writing-what-matters/
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-806027083982426737#

To read more about Adeline Yen Mah and her work, visit her website: http://adelineyenmah.com/

And for more on the poet, Philip Larkin, check out: http://www.philiplarkin.com/links.html