It's so noisy

Do you ever feel that your ears and eyes are just too big? That they take in too much of the world at once? Sometimes it's a pleasure to be hyper-aware, but other times it's a poisonous distraction. When there are storms inside — creative storms, storms of grief or joy — the noisy whirlwind outside becomes intolerable. That's my state at the moment. I can't bear the noise. I feel quite sad. It's not a desolate sadness; on the contrary, I think it's more like the fertile sadness Rilke described so well. And it needs a certain amount of quiet to blossom. So I'm going to seek more quiet for a while. I won't be so visible out there in the virtual world, but I will be here, chez BitterGrace. I welcome visitors. Just leave the noise outside.

The only sadnesses that are dangerous and unhealthy are the ones that we carry around in public in order to drown them out with the noise; like diseases that are treated superficially and foolishly, they just withdraw and after a short interval break out again all the more terribly; and gather inside us and are life, are life that is unlived, rejected, lost, life that we can die of. If only it were possible for us to see farther than our knowledge reaches, and even a little beyond the outworks of our presentiment, perhaps we would bear our sadnesses with greater trust than we have in our joys. For they are the moments when something new has entered us, something unknown; our feelings grow mute in shy embarrassment, everything in us withdraws, a silence arises, and the new experience, which no one knows, stands in the midst of it all and says nothing. ~ Rilke, from Letters to a Young Poet


Photo by Maria Browning ©2014