Silence.

It’s said to be gold.
For a Catholic, especially during Lent, silence is important because it allows thinking and praying. That’s true, silence sometimes is as precious as gold, and even more.

That’s the good silence.
There is a bad silence? In my humble opinion: yes, there is!
Something that literally drives me crazy is the minute, or so, of silence asked when something of bad happens. Beside the fact that I have big problems to accept that someone tells me when I have to keep silent or not, I wonder what the hell they think you can understand ALONE in one minute? Alone? Yep, because if you just keep silent, if you don’t pray if you don’t think (keeping silent doesn’t assure that you are “thinking about”) you are alone and you will just waste a minute of your life.

I think there are many “shades”of silence.
Indeed in the midway from bad silence to good one, there is that kind of silence that you cannot define “hurtful”, but you are in even if you don’t want to. I grew up in this kind of silence. I have a good family and I had some friends, but for years I spent most of my free time staying at home and that’s why I started to read, write down stuff, do some “artistic” works, chat online or (later) taking photographs.
For me I wasn't being in silence because during each of this activity I could hear my voice in my mind... but if something distracted me from my activity, this made me realize how lonely and silent I was being.
Just for example... when I read I hear the voice of my mind, or if the book is cool I can see images and hear characters' different voices and I don’t feel alone…unless something call back me to reality. Often, when I used to read at night, was a man on a carriage pulled by an horse passing at 4am. The horse step noise made me realize that I had spent all the night awake and alone.

I used to consider these “silent situations" normal life situation… till a night of few days ago, when I found myself thinking about what I have done in my life. That night I realized that I spent a lot of my time alone surrounded by a silence similar to the one that was surrounding me in that moment, and…that was a silence I couldn’t stop! Even listening to music wouldn’t have made me able to destroy my loneliness and sadness.

I wished I could turn on my computer and listen to my friend voice, as I used to do some summers before... and this made me realize that I couldn’t remember the voice of the only friend (known online) I spoke via voice for a lot of time.
In that moment I hated silence! I linked it with the idea of being alone an sad, and this drove me crazy because I felt alike I wasted my youth with reading, writing, chatting, taking pictures…
But, while I was thinking this, in my mind comes up this image:
I took this photo in April 2006. In the back yard of my country house. I was ,again alone at silence but there was no way that I could consider that silence annoying. Nothing could make me think that I had wasted my time that day. Indeed I consider that day, one of the happiest day of my life.
Once again a picture calmed me down, made me appreciate what I had received in my life. I appreciated life itself.

That’s probably a goal of good silences, and that’s probably the kind of silence I feel more comfortable with.

Being alone, with my camera trying to create, but I would say “to save”, wonderful frames of this world.

Am I blasphemous if I say that this the best way I can pray?