Saying the Quiet Part Out Loud

listen, listen…

[3 m. read]

Hello there, Dreamer, 

I (Graham) turned 41 last week. It was lovely: a morning plunge in the Salish Sea (I made it 5 minutes!), fat breakfast burritos, a trip to Seattle with M for a tattoo (me ↓) and a nose piercing (her) and a ferry ride over to Poulsbo for a delicious family dinner.

Holy Heron, Batman!

But to be honest, I wasn’t expecting much out of this birthday. 40 was the big one; I assumed everything until 50 would just be filler.

Except that since then something has been tugging at the sleeve of my awareness. It started as a quiet voice I couldn’t place, something in me saying, “Listen, listen…”.

It stuck in my mental craw like a splinter in my mind. Perhaps you know that insistent tug—something important that won’t resolve, that won’t reveal itself fully but also won’t go away.

It hung around for a few days until I finally got the memo. I created some quiet space to sit and follow the thread of its prompting. What arose behind my eyelids was a vision of an anonymous, blurry figure beckoning me down a dark, rocky hallway into…

…something.

It’s not the clarity I was hoping for, exactly. But as I’ve sat with it, I find I starting to articulate what it might be calling me towards.

Here’s what I’m sensing: as I shift fully into my 40’s, I have new commitments I want to make and I have some stakes in the ground I’m ready to uproot and reposition. I have the opportunity to decide more clearly who I want to be—and I what I want to be about—in the second half of life.

All this brings to mind a quote I heard years ago by local(ish) poet David Whyte*, who tells us, 

“Poetry is the art of hearing ourselves say things from which it is impossible to retreat.”

I’m hearing myself say things and ask questions that need addressing, things that, once said, can’t be unsaid. I’m starting to say the quiet parts out loud.

Has that ever happened to you? You find yourself in a a moment of shocking awareness where you say what’s really true:

I don’t want to keep living like this…
I am sad or angry or afraid or…
I feel so much more alive when....
I want more from my life…
I must change my life…

These are often moments of intense emotional honesty, threshold moments where the facade of our assumed selves crack or drop away and the sharp light of honesty shines through. It can be a fierce kindness: the truth revealed, the path made (a little more) clear.

Dreams, as it happens, offer this gift: they, too, say the quiet part out loud. 

Dreams have the advantage of being unhindered by our conscious minds, the part of us that caught with rules, consequence, morality and cultural appropriateness (Don’t say that! Don’t think that! Don’t do that!). Our dreams aren’t worried about being nice or proper or even logical.

In this way, our dreams are more honest and reliable communicators [beneath the strangely coded exterior of their images and symbols]. As such, they can deliver unvarnished truths that let us hear ourselves say things from which it’s impossible for us to retreat—if we will risk giving them our attention.

We see this all the time in Dreamtime. 

We’ve sat with folks whose dreams have brought up old hurts and griefs that still haunt, revealed doubts about important relationships, questioned how people see themselves or others, dreams shouting out joys that are asking to be named when awake. 

One man named his desire to be a father; another questioned the stability of his marriage. A woman in one group grieved her mother’s death, years later, all over again; another looked fully at joyful questions about her next steps in life as her children left home.

We humans are ingenious at avoiding and denying ourselves, looking the other way at the most important parts of our experiences--both the difficult shadows and (perhaps more often) the gold lurking in our depths. Dreams are so powerful precisely because, like poetry, they manage to cut to the heart of the matter. 

So, Dreamer, what truth-telling might your dreams be doing? 

What quiet murmurings might you need to hear yourself say out loud? 

We invite you to sift your dreams--and the residue that lingers when awake--listening and looking more closely at what’s already there, waiting for you. This is not necessarily a quick process, but a meditative journey.

If you’d like help listening more deeply to your dreams, please get in touch. We’d love to dream with you. 

Deep dreams, 
Graham and Matthew

*Fun fact: if you trek on up to Whidbey Island and skulk around with the rabbits long enough, you might just catch a glimpse of the old deep-eyed bard.

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