Silence Was Here Before You

"Let us wait in silence; perhaps soon we will hear the murmur of the gods."
— Maurice Maeterlinck, The Treasure of the Humble (1896)
Belgian playwright and essayist

There are presences that do not announce themselves. They wait to be noticed.

The Hanged Man stops. He surrenders the reaching, the explaining, the wanting to make something happen. In the stopping, a presence the moving life kept hidden becomes available. The High Priestess is what waits there — the inner knowing that does not need to speak in order to be true.

Together, the two cards describe a single small movement: the willingness to remain still long enough for what has always been near to be recognized.

Silence is not the absence of someone.
It is the presence of something older than speech.

This meditation moves through breath, stillness, and the quiet fact of being here at all. Not silence as emptiness, but silence as a companion — a form of nearness that does not need words.

You may stay.

Listen

This is the first of seven meditations in Silence, an album rooted in the Belgian playwright and essayist Maurice Maeterlinck's The Treasure of the Humble (1896).