A few days ago we posted a tale in which the ever-resourceful, sometimes wise and often foolish Mullah Nasruddin promoted the virtue of his hen because she did not chatter like a parrot.  She had the wisdom, he claimed, to keep silent about her wonderful thoughts. Of course, as the hen says nothing we have no way to judge the quality of her inner world, which might remind us of the saying that it is better to keep silent and be thought a fool than to open one’s mouth and be confirmed as one.

There is a paradoxical quality to silence; people profoundly long for it (although they seldom seem to achieve it) and yet we could ask ourselves, is it possible to long for the absence of something?  Aren’t we really longing for what can be revealed when the obscuring screen of noise and activity fades away?

In the Nature Meditations, there are a number of phrases devoted to silence, such as for example:
Through the silence of nature,
I attain Thy divine peace.*
The saying brings a wonderful atmosphere, despite the fact that we might have difficulty finding silence in the acoustical sense in nature.  Even in the desert, we may hear the wind gently stirring innumerable grains of sand, and our own steps and breath and heartbeat.  This tells us that  the silence we yearn for is not the ‘dead air’ that can be experienced in isolation chambers, but the lack of mental chatter that permits the recognition of something more profound.

And what is it that we hope to recognise?  See for yourself: withdraw your attention from the messages of the ears; cease to participate in the activity of your thoughts; put your awareness in your heart – and wait.

Whatever such moments reveal to you will never be communicated by chattering parrots.

*The Nature Meditations is a collection of phrases given by Hazrat Inayat Khan on different elements of nature, such as trees, flowers, light, landscape and so on.  They are keyed to the breath, so that one may contemplate the object of concentration while coordinating the breath and thought.  In the phrase given here, the first part of the thought, ‘Through the silence of nature,’ would be carried silently on the in-breath, and the second part, ‘I attain Thy divine peace’ would be carried silently on the out-breath.