Closing Moral Gaps, Reciprocity, and Healing Wounds

"Not speaking and speaking are both human ways of being in the world, and there are kinds and grades of each. There is the dumb silence of slumber or apathy; the sober silence that goes with a solemn animal face; the fertile silence of awareness, pasturing the soul, whence emerge new thoughts; the alive silence of alert perception, ready to say, “This… this…”; the musical silence that accompanies absorbed activity; the silence of listening to another speak, catching the drift and helping him be clear; the noisy silence of resentment and self-recrimination, loud and subvocal speech but sullen to say it; baffled silence; the silence of peaceful accord with other persons or communion with the cosmos." 

Paul Goodman


 

You know what it feels like to hold

a burning piece of paper, maybe even

trying to read it as the flames get close

to your fingers until all you’re holding

is a curl of ash by its white ear tip

yet the words still hover in the air?

That’s how I feel now.