The sound of silence

Sometimes it speaks loudest of all.

The day started with the feeling that the door had closed.

After the ecstatic, frenetic energies of the previous few days, everything on this morning was… quiet.

Still. Silent.

It frightened me. I was afraid that when it had become overwhelming, and I asked everything to slow down, maybe I had closed a door I couldn’t open again. But in opening, emptying myself and truly asking to listen, I heard exactly what I needed. I grasp the gnosis of nahuales today—the energies of the day, according to the Maya calendar system—and feel in my being what it means that each day has its own unique signature. I am learning to hear, identify, channel each distinct song, and in a way, it’s kind of what our conceptions of time and matter are:

a collection of vibrations, brought together for a moment;

each day, week, trecena (13-day Maya calendrical period), and year is like a crystalline structure, snowflake, star, or human being;

individual vibrations uniting briefly to assemble something that is beautiful and perfect yet fleeting, before dissolving, disappearing completely to become another thing.

I drew the Tarot card of the Ancestor, which card represents the archetypes of nature, on the day of Kej, the Maya nahual of the deer and forest. I started reading my mentor’s book, my PhD advisor who recently crossed over, and experienced them stepping through the portal to collaborate actively across planes of reality; they had come up with a framework for doing. But I also see and feel now that I have already been doing the same thing. I just have been using a fragmented amalgamation of frameworks, cobbling together my own unique practice from the melodies and rhythms of resonance I’ve gathered along my own winding path, clearing annother furrow through the snow to help others find the same things I have. My role, I feel, I hear, is to help lead the queers and weirdos, trans and divergent in every sense, into the forest, by helping each find their own resonant frequency; their own way in.

Something is moving, something has shifted. I hear the voice of the deer today; I hear my mentor; I hear my ancestors and collaborators across timelines and geographies.

The voice of Kej, the forest, sounds like James Earl Jones: slow and calm, strong and measured. Grounded, of course, because it’s Earth.

It’s the energy of when we were all trees, and our fingers were roots that spread deep into the ground, absorbing nutrients from what surrounds and sending it out through mycelial connections, silent symbiosis, telepathic transmissions. It’s the womb space that connects us, where all needs are provided for without even asking; where there is no scarcity, but enoughness, and all are safe, even in death.

It says: listen. It says: here. If you leave, you can come back again. And you’ll realize you were never really gone to begin with.

The sound of loving awareness is the silence, which is never totally quiet. It’s things coming closer and then retreating, ending and beginning. It’s the sound of cicadas in the moments after the ceremony ends, when we are gently arriving, particles reassembling one by one to create the world of objects; to temporarily resume form. It’s the deafening silence of the mountains in the sacred valley.

It’s the whisper the branches of the cedar made above me on that Independence Day when I realized that I didn’t want to die in Texas.

This is what I want to convey, to help people discover: that great, loving presence, its silent holding; the stillness of infinite love that simply comes as a feeling, without saying anything, and makes you not just hear or see but know, gnow, feel in your bones that you’re not alone. The thing that makes you want to choose to stay alive a little bit longer, so you can help others survive and feel these moments, too.

So I ask for guidance: how do I convey this? Help me share this message with others who are suffering in ways that they can understand. Help me reach people through different mediums and messages. Help me transmit this love in ways that all different people can understand.

Above all, help me connect with those others who have felt as alone as I did, who felt so separate they didn’t want to be alive anymore. Help me show them that there are so many different ways into the oneness; help me convey what I’ve experienced, which is that when you find the methods for connection that resonate and enliven your spirit,

the Universe will throw so much love your way that it’ll make your head spin,

until you’re overwhelmed with gratitude, and you feel the relief of realizing that you have always been worthy just because you exist; that you belong, already, without you having to prove that you deserve it.

You deserve it.

As powerful as sound can be, the answer, on this day, came in the quiet space. The contrast between the beats.

Before you can be nobody, you have to realize you exist. You have to believe you deserve it, and choose to be here. You have to know your boundaries, and affirm them without infringing on those of others. At least, that’s my experience.

The fallacy is anyone trying to tell anybody there’s only one way in; I think we are wise to be suspicious of any one-size-fits-all solution. The only way any of this stuff makes sense is to directly experience it with your senses, in the way that resonates for your unique frequency, then transmit that back in your own unique way. You deserve to feel this loving awareness and choose and share the ways in which you access it. The key is to do this with reciprocity and respect; make offerings, be of service, give back, once you have been nurtured enough that your cup is full enough to pour from, that is, these are the steps.

Most of us don’t have frameworks for this anymore in the Anglosphere and Europe, so we cobble things together from other cultures. That’s okay; it’s normal, even. It’s syncretism, part of the way human culture has always been formed. People have been trading ideas and experiences through traveling to other lands, interacting with other peoples, swapping practices and material culture, for as long as there have been people. It’s part of our nomadic heritage. But there were always frameworks, containers, apprenticeships, guidance, initiations, and these are what we have lost in many Anglocentric contexts. So we must learn from those who keep the traditions that survive. Make your own way, but cite your sources; try to give as much as you take; give more to those who have less; always show respect.

The most powerful part of the ceremony, to me, isn’t the ecstatic frenetic energy, as incredible as that can be. It isn’t even necessarily the deconstruction or the revelation. It’s the space between it ending and things rearranging. Those moments of quiet arrival when our particles are slowly reassembling, and we feel our belonging, and the understanding ripples through everything, people across cultures and trees and plants, and the ridiculousness of our predicament passes between us without speaking a word, and we laugh.

This is what the title of my thesis really means, and I hope to embody and convey this message in all I create:

We go alone together.

And we do it singing, dancing, laughing, and feasting as we walk each other home.

So after I landed, I went downstairs and fed the cats, and fed myself, and had a moment just as nondual as what I felt sitting in the dark with leftover coconut rice, not even warmed up, straight out of the pan with sliced-up avocado and banana, and laughed at how, sometimes, it’s all really quite simple.

Reading/Watching/Listening this week:

• “Scattered Minds,” Gabor Maté

• “Performing With the Dead,” Kit Danowski

• Various lectures and podcast appearances on YouTube by Rupert Sheldrake

• Soma meditation, Ram Dass

• “Portrait of the Artist,” James Joyce

Also working on:

• Cacao zine project for Bean to Barstool.

• A million half-finished newsletters.

• Documenting my process in my PhD journal.

• Book proposal about psychedelic healing and music/sound.

• Ideating about a potential federated Substack/virtual magazine for food and drinks writers (reach out to me if this sparks something in you!)

• Rest, care, and feeding.