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When the house is quiet, or better yet, when my soul is still and I can at last calm the shaking in the water glass, I begin to enjoy the rising silence around me. The light that comes in gentle tides from above ignites my wood floor in all its tawny splendour after travelling light years to get here — as if its only purpose were to travel light years to reveal mysteries embedded in the grain of an old pine floor.
I go into the silence in search of things to say. Sometimes they are passing moments, like the rustling of ivy or a kiss delivered on a park bench. Other times it is a sensation: the crunch of pebbles under foot or while I am sheltering under a tree in a storm that the quiet words begin to flow. If you let your tongue rest and reduce your mind to numbness, then everything begins to speak to you.
Everything I know is made of words: the books, of course, but also the space between things, the glances that do not find their mark, the falling of a leaf, a gust of air. Even silences are made of words. All these things come to me as words; I cannot know them any other way. There is no pure wordless state before the words themselves take shape. I know the world through words and without them I doubt if it would exist.
Writing, I have discovered, is not a matter of finding the right word to describe some non-word thing. The words are already there. They are part of the essence of things; without the word “kiss” two lips would never touch.
Writing is rather the act of listening carefully. If you listen well enough, the words present themselves like a mist rising from the forest floor. They do not need your assistance; they need your silence. If you don’t scare them off, they come of their own accord like the little creatures in the forest that begin to scurry from their cover.
A young girl gazes out her window at cherry blossoms that have only just burst open. She watches them being ripped off the branches by an uncaring storm. The petals swirl in diminutive tornadoes in her garden. Ours is a world with an inexhaustible bent towards beauty. The petals, torn from a tree, become the playthings of a storm. Even in the most wretched places, a weed comes up through a crack, sunlight tapers through a cell window, the scent of jasmine perfumes a sour wind.
We hear them, see them, feel them, smell them, taste them. Words are everywhere and everything.
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