Below is something I thumb-wrote on my iPhone’s notepad, on a beautiful breezy night in Mexico, during the best vacation of my life, to the hushing sound of tepid waves.  I gave myself plenty of time on this vacation to reflect, to breathe, to meditate, and simply to be.  I was born again on this vacation.

Whether we write them down or never allow them to leave the privacy of our own minds, open and undirected reflections are an essential exercise -- not of the mind, but of the spirit...of our larger selves. 

To me, recording free-flowing reflections is a meditative experience, similar to aspects of classical meditation (e.g., mindfulness): But in writing, we go beyond observing our thoughts attentively; we record them.  In any case, here it is:

 A Meditation on Sound and Silence

Silence -- in any form...in any context -- only broadens the range of possible interpretations of its meaning, and its intended meaning.  Sound, in any form of perceptible self-expression, narrows the range of interpretive possibilities.

Silence -- understood broadly as a glimpse of The Unknown and a reminder of its immensity -- naturally seems more interesting to us, more evocative, pregnant with possibilities that stir the imagination.  But sound -- understood broadly as a raid on the unspoken -- seems disenchantingly concrete, and it easily risks disappointing us by reducing the infinite to the mundane, the mysterious to the obvious.

The space-time coordinates of sound float around the most accessible quadrant of this-worldly, sub-infinite possibilities. But silence transcends the coordinate system.

This dichotomy between sound and silence seems to position silence as the superior realm. This is an understandable but simplistic conclusion that simply misses the point.

Silence can entice. But it can never satisfy us without revealing the spirit that animates it. This revelation can only come through the medium of sound -- the medium of expression, including all of its subdivisions by genre, style and physical sphere.

The urge to express ourselves, whether with a simple thought or a complex artistic vision, seems grounded in the conviction that the realm of the unexpressed can never find comfort in its own infinity.  In fact, the infinite only comes to life through finite expressions.

Silence may be pregnant with possibilities, but creation is only possible in the buzzing realm of the real, the here and now. Only by overcoming the seductions of silence -- only by parting with the oceanic to embrace the seemingly mundane -- only by speaking, writing, painting, sculpting, experimenting -- only through a joyful embrace of the priggish rationality of the scientific method -- only through these channels, can humanity's grandest creations echo in the otherwise silent eternity.  Only by speaking could “god” create the world.

Does this mean that the expressive urge is our nobler calling, compared to the allure of the unspoken? No. Silence and sound have a definitionally symbiotic relationship, a ying-yang-like interconnection and co-dependency. The expressed manifests and exemplifies the possible. The possible is a disembodied potentiality yearning to become real, knowing that only a small fragment of its essence can complete this breakthrough at any particular moment.

It is because of this limitation that the expressive urge is infinite. It draws its energy from the very mystery of being, the infinite set of possibilities that it can interpret and make real.