Silent Magic

“Since childhood, silence, for me, has been a blessed retreat. Within its peaceful embrace there is a clear and certain magic. True to the Collins English Gem’s definition of magic, silence powers my imagination and is not only an agent of healing, but of significant change as well.” Helen Noakes 

Waking Point

By Helen Noakes

“Magic—Any mysterious agency or power.”—Collins English Gem Dictionary

SAN FRANCISCO California—(Weekly Hubris)—10/7/2013—I have been silent of late. Custom dictates that I apologize, but the fact is that I’m not sorry and an apology would be a lie.

Since childhood, silence, for me, has been a blessed retreat. Within its peaceful embrace there is a clear and certain magic. True to the Collins English Gem’s definition of magic, silence powers my imagination and is not only an agent of healing, but of significant change as well.

And magic has so many forms: music, words, art. Books and writing begin and end my days. In the morning, my journey into another writer’s words nudges me to string words of my own into sentences. And I’m off into worlds of my particular imaginings.

I love the early morning hours, when my corner of the world is only just waking, when the view outside my window is only just being defined by light, when stillness enfolds me tenuously, before the bustling day begins. That’s when my mind still lingers in the subconscious, and ideas flow with ease onto the page.

Within the silence of the last few months, I found the words to fuel my writing, not for this column, alas, but for my novel Mythos—Genesis, and for two plays: “The Enchantress of Santa Fe,” and “Kallisti—The Golden Apple.”

One fine morning, words I had written long ago in Greece came back to me. I was compelled to find the journals I kept then, and began to write a memoir, The Art of Living Dangerously.

“Beginning something new when you’re not finished with the novel or the plays?” the disciplinarian within me chided. But the urge to launch into the memoir was relentless and, for these past few quiet months, I have continued to write four separate works with an urgency I’ve never felt before.

Is time running out for me? I do not know, but I know this: whatever time I have left, I choose to spend it writing. Because, you see, the process is everything. Pencil to paper, handwritten texts transcribed into the computer, the first edit, the second—there is a certain peace and fulfillment in the work.

And words! Words nudge me, spilling over each other, intent upon being written. A passage from The Art of Living Dangerously best describes what is happening:

“. . . in my mind, words began to arrange themselves into sentences. That’s how it always started, my urge to write. A sentence would appear, and then another, until sentences evolved in paragraphs.”

So, I continue writing four very different pieces of work, sometimes ignoring mundane tasks altogether. And when I finally address the everyday, my mind becomes preoccupied with a line of dialogue in “Kallisti,” or a segment of prose in Mythos. I stop whatever I’m doing to jot the idea down, itching to get back to pencil and paper or computer.If I were to analyze my obsession, I would say that it is compounded by the freedom to indulge it.

And now for my confession. Despite all this writing, my mind has not been able to devise . . . a column. I have begun several, even finished a few but, upon rereading them, tore them up. There was nothing there I truly wanted to say, really wanted to share. Until today. With a warm autumn breeze wafting into my room, I thought I would share with you the reason for my silence and urge you, too, to seek a quiet place. Pick up a book to read and cherish, pick up a pen to write down a thought, listen to music, or just gaze out your window at the world beyond and then turn inward to the world within. I know you’ll find magic there, and a gift of self.

Note: The image used to illustrate this essay was created by Barbara Burghart-Perreault, whose work may be viewed at http://burghart-perreaultfineart.com/.