Jewels from the Dark

There are times in my life when I crave the second noun form of silence – “absence of sound or noise: stillness.”¹ This world is loud and seems to have only gotten louder still in recent years. I find my heart and body and soul aching for silence and stillness, especially as a mom of boys. This type of silence and stillness is full of the promise of peace and rest to me.

Winter has long been my favorite season because of the moments of muted, peaceful silence from freshly falling snow. Winter seems to hold multiple forms of silence. At the beginning, there is the silence of loss – loss of warmth, loss of light, loss of connection – as the cold and snow and ice support isolating oneself. Then we move into the stillness of the season. We have adjusted (some more than others) to the losses and have accepted that winter has set in. We embrace the stillness in silence, when the snow muffles noise, and we find ways to reconnect with what we care about. Then comes the anticipation… The length of anticipatory silence can seem to drag on forever. We know spring is coming, but first we must make it through the potential frigid temperatures and blizzards that always seem to find us in March. Just when we think we cannot survive one more day waiting for the season to change, we see that it already has. Tiny green buds and bursts of color litter the world around us and we ease into the new warmth and light that can only be Spring.

There is a verb form of silence, however. Silence, here, is used “to compel or reduce to silence: still; suppress.“² This is the Silence of the Ruins. I have used many metaphors in my writing thus far (oceans, shipwrecks, caves, etc.). One I keep coming back to is the Ruins. It feels like, in the last 5 years, I have watched my life be systematically dismantled…where events set about “to destroy the integrity or functioning of“³ my very being. That is the deep and overwhelming pain of living loss and grief. Yet, I am still here. And I am still standing in the midst of my Ruins…in the Silence.

Silence can be profound. It can be crushing. It can be beautiful. It can be a harbinger of many things. It can also be the deafening sound you hear before the birds start to sing their springtime song and the world turns colorful again.

The Silence I am experiencing right now is the soul-crushing, suppressive silence of loss. Yet Silence is also my teacher right now, showing me the unforced rhythms of grace and the ability to wait with eager anticipation for the next change in the season of life. After all, even Ruins can be made beautiful again with the growth of new life covering the cracks and spaces with beauty where pain once reigned.

References
1. Merriam-Webster. (n.d.). Silence. In Merriam-Webster.com dictionary. Retrieved January 20, 2025, from https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/silence
2. Ibid.
3. Merriam-Webster. (n.d.). Dismantled. In Merriam-Webster.com dictionary. Retrieved January 20, 2025, from https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/dismantled