At a certain point, you say to the woods, to the sea, to the mountains, the world, Now I am ready. Now I will stop and be wholly attentive. You empty yourself and wait, listening. After a time you hear it: there is nothing there. There is nothing but those things only, those created objects, discrete, growing or holding, or swaying, being rained on or raining, held, flooding or ebbing, standing, or spread. You feel the world's word as a tension, a hum, a single chorused note everywhere the same. This is it: this hum is the silence. Nature does utter a peep - just this one. The birds and insects, the meadows and swamps and rivers and stones and mountains and clouds: they all do it; they all don't do it. There is a vibrancy to the silence, a suppression, as if someone were gagging the world. But you wait, you give your life's length to listening, and nothing happens. The ice rolls up, the ice rolls back, and still that single note obtains. The tension, or lack of it, is intolerable. The silence is not actually suppression: instead, it is all there is. Annie Dillard
About This Quote

The quote above, by Gary Snyder, is one of the most powerful I have ever read. It speaks to the idea that silence is not just an absence of sound or music, but a state where everything is present at once—both the human world and the natural world. Like "the greatest glory in living lies not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall," this quote has a very empowering message. It describes a feeling of stillness within which fills the being with an overwhelming sense of being all there is.

The hum of nature’s voice is also described as an intolerable tension—a hum that fills one with an immense feeling of potentiality. It is this potentiality that does not manifest itself into actuality. Reality itself is this tension between possibility and actuality.

Source: Teaching A Stone To Talk: Expeditions And Encounters

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More Quotes By Annie Dillard
  1. Time is how you spend your love.
  2. People talk about the happy quiet that can exist between two loves, but this, too, was great; sitting between his sister and his brother, saying nothing, eating. Before the world existed, before it was populated, and before there were wars and jobs and colleges and...
  3. In the end, your past is not my past and your truth is not my truth and your solution - is not my solution.
  4. Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand — but tell it. Resign yourself to the lifelong sadness that comes from never ­being satisfied.
  5. Cos if it's encyclopedias we've got enough, like, information... and if it's God, you've got the wrong house.
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