Wordless Language

Yesterday I read another book by Paulo Coehlo. It was just as good as the other books I have read by him. There are observations and ideas that I have never thought about life, but make perfect sense to me. One of the things that made the most sense was the idea of a universal language. For me, I would call it the wordless language.

Living at L'arche, you can learn a lot about wordless language. There are many people here with the government title of non-verbal, but for me that never seems to fit. It is the people who don't speak using full and complete sentences that teach me more than most of the lecturers I have had at university. The act of sitting and simply being is more profound than most of the conversations that I hold at university. When something is said, it is because there is something to say instead of simply needing to say something.

Silence also shows the true measure of a person. Some cannot stand to be alone with their thoughts in silence because they are tormented by something. They want to run away or distract themselves from what is in their own heads with what is outside of it. They refuse to deal with what they live with on a daily basis and instead deal with what everyone lives with. It takes a secure person the be able to exist in silence, without the need to talk or listen to music. To simply be with their own thoughts and know that they are at peace.

There are times when you can have a complete conversation with a friend simply by sitting on the front porch in silence. You know that you are both at peace and are aware of each other without having to ask for the attention that you crave. It is the ability to simply sit and be in love. That is the true wordless language of the world.

It is sometimes strange to wonder how people from other countries can fall in love so easily when they don't have a common language. The answer to that is that they do. They might not know it, but it exists, waiting to be used in the center of everyone. We all want to be spoken to in this language. We want to hear someone call our name without opening their mouths and answer our hearts when the world seems so dark. We can choose to exist in this language we have chosen, or I suppose that has chosen us, or we can ignore it. When we open our hearts to those around us, we realize that there is more than the languages found in dictionaries. There is a language we don't have to study, but we are constantly growing in. A wordless language. The language of love.