[Copas Tulisan] Kahlil Gibran on Silence, Solitude, and the Courage to Know Yourself
"In much of your talking, thinking is half murdered. For thought is a bird of space, that in a cage of words may indeed unfold its wings but cannot fly." Something strange and wondrous begins to happen when one spends stretches of time in solitude, in the company of trees, far from the bustle of the human world with its echo chamber of judgments and opinions --- a kind of rerooting in one's deepest self-knowledge, a relearning of how to simply be oneself, one's most authentic self. Wendell Berry knew this when he observed that "true solitude is found in the wild place, where one is without human obligation" --- the places where "one's inner voices become audible." But that inner, I have found, exists in counterpoise to the outer voice --- the more we are tasked with speaking, with orienting lip and ear to the world without, the more difficult it becomes to hear the hum of the world within and feel its magmatic churns of self-knowledge, ...