Quiet v. Silence: A Meditation

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Remember that there is a difference between quiet and silence. One is boundless and open, it roves and explores, soaks and meditates. The other is still and constricted, painfully aware, afraid. The world is loud, but quiet helps us to hear ourselves. Silence says, this is too much, let me go into myself so I do not have to participate. Quiet politely excuses itself. There are many ways to communicate and we do not always need our words to do it. The divine feminine receives, collects, and synthesizes. There is a synergy intrinsic to her being in that she meditates on the stimuli available, accepts, or rejects frequencies. The divinely feminine woman curates her inner landscape to her satisfaction. She takes inventory of what is. Quiet as “a metaphor for the full range of one’s inner life” is a meditation on soulfulness (Quashie 6).

Can you imagine what it feels like to go inside yourself for a time? Maybe you come back out, see a friend after a while, they ask what you’ve been up to and, in your mind’s eye, you can only conjure vignettes of tree branches bending to the cadence of the wind’s song (as you witnessed through your window), paintbrushes on your floor, the almost-but-not-quite pain in your thighs as you stretched into that pose you thought you were gonna die in during last week's yoga class. You can recall the feeling that flows through you every time you pick up that thick ass book you’ve been reading for you-don’t-know-how-many months and is giving you the best dreams of your life. You think of the fullness in your belly as you belt the words to that new Badu (ba-a-a-a-aaaaa-byyyy) on the way to work [cuz it won’t stop pulsing in your veins]...but none of that makes sense in the linear kind of way or is easy to explain. (Or maybe it is. It depends on the friend.) But you’ve been having a raucous time. You’ve been traipsing through fields of gold. You’ve been delving, playin around with some forest creatures.

“Silence often denotes something that is suppressed or repressed, and is an interiority that is about withholding, absence, and stillness.  Quiet, on the other hand, is presence ...and encompass fantastic motion. It is true that silence can be expressive, but its expression is often based on refusal or protest, on the abundance and wildness of the interior described above. Indeed, the expressiveness of silence is often aware of an audience, a watcher or listener whose presence is the reason for withholding--it is an expressiveness which is intent and even defiant. This is the key difference between the two terms because in its inwardness, the aesthetic of quiet is watcherless.” (Quashie 22)

I encourage each of us to be quiet more. To learn some reverence towards ourselves and our interior, the “dynamic and ravishing” landscape that is a stay against the dominance of the social world, one with its own sovereign domain. To honor ourselves as creators and curators of our spirits. There is a difference between quiet and silence. Quiet is productive. You are not missing out. Commune with your wildish nature. Live as if you are watcherless. What do you desire? Where do you want to go? Be wild. No one even has to know. Yet.

Inspired by Kevin Quashie’s The Sovereignty of Quiet: Beyond Resistance in Black Culture