Silence
There are Vipassanas, and there are seasons in a life where silence becomes golden.
Not necessarily comfortable — but the more I am immersed in it, the quieter I become.
My most centred weeks are the ones where I have one or two days in near-absolute silence from speaking. There have been times, while travelling alone, when this has stretched for many days — almost a couple of weeks.
And something in me returns.
An absolute decompression begins. The breath settles into longer tides. The sails move through calm, balmy breezes of a treasured moment. In this quiet, I begin to hear the subtlest whispers of my soul, and the tempo of the place I am in.
And silence is not always solitude.
Silence is not the absence of connection.
It is where the deepest connection often begins.
It can be found in exchanging smiles with a stranger walking past, in locking eyes with a toddler’s curious stare at the supermarket, in a shared laugh of acknowledgement with a passerby. It is there in the holding of hands beside a hospital bed.
Silence with someone is special too, even when there is noise around. There is a look, a smile, a felt sense that arrives. Those moments between conversation are precious to me.
Perhaps silence is the white space around things — the space that allows us to see what is truly there.
They do not need to be filled.
They are already speaking.
🤍
As Light Bodies continues, I can feel another body of work beginning to gather quietly beside it.
The paintings are asking for words.
The words from The Gentle Kind are asking to sit beside the images.
Together, they are beginning to form something like a companion field guide — a small bedside book of tenderness, observation, image and silence, made with people in recovery in mind.
A book for those moving through illness, grief, fatigue, uncertainty, or repair.
Something quiet enough to keep company without asking too much. Something that can be held beside a bed, opened slowly, and returned to when the body is still finding its way back.
I think silence is becoming part of this next body of work too.
Not only as quietness, but as space.
The space around the image.
The pause before a word.
The white field around a flower.
The bedside moment where nothing needs to be fixed, only held.
A silence that is not empty.
A silence that is already speaking.
⌾