Silence Is Not Silent

For much of my life, silence felt like punishment. It meant something was wrong. It was the pause after being chastised, the awkward moment that stretched too long, the space where no one knew what to say. I thought of silence as absence — a void where meaning should have been. It carried shame and unease.

That changed in the Yukon and Alaska, when it was just Dexter and me. Out there, silence revealed itself in an entirely different way. It wasn’t absence. It was presence. It wasn’t void. It was alive.

The first days felt overwhelming. Vastness pressed down, as though the landscape itself swallowed sound. But slowly, silence began to open. I realized it wasn’t empty at all — it had texture. The longer I stayed with it, the more I could hear and feel.

I remember the deep, steady breathing of a bison in the distance, each exhale fogging the cold air, grounding me in its raw presence. The sudden flutter of wings as an eagle folded itself into a dive, breaking stillness with a precision that ended in life and death. The sharp, delayed crack of a glacier, echoing through the fjord before thunder rolled down the valley as ice sheared into the sea.

These weren’t interruptions to silence. They were its voice.

Dexter understood this instinctively. He was fluent in silence. His ears flicked before I registered a change in wind. His body stiffened when presence moved near, long before my eyes caught it. His breathing slowed when the night itself grew still. He knew how to listen without words, and in his company I began to learn.

Listening without words is its own kind of discipline. It requires opening not only the ears, but the body itself — eyes, skin, breath, intuition. It means being attuned to vibration, to rhythm, to presence itself. Some nights Dexter and I sat by the fire in complete quiet. No speech, no explanation, no need. His companionship filled the silence as surely as the stars filled the sky. In those moments, silence wasn’t awkward. It was communion.

That is a very different silence than the one I have known with people. Human silence has often been harsher, less forgiving.

There is the silence after conflict — when words stop not because peace has been found, but because distance has. A slammed door, an unfinished sentence, a long pause that calcifies into estrangement. That silence is sharp, leaving cuts that words might have softened.

There is the silence of absence — calls unanswered, messages ignored, letters never replied to. It’s a silence that breeds uncertainty, filling the mind with questions that have nowhere to land. Did I say too much? Too little? Was it rejection? Was it dismissal? Or was it simply indifference? That silence doesn’t clarify; it corrodes.

There is the silence of estrangement — when the bond itself has frayed, and what is left unspoken weighs more than anything that could be said. It is not the absence of communication, but the absence of connection. In that silence, love doesn’t rage or even argue; it simply disappears into the void.

And there is the silence of pretense — when two people still share a room, even a life, but no longer share themselves. They talk of errands, weather, logistics. The necessary words are spoken, while the essential ones — the words of truth, of need, of longing — are left to die in the gaps between. This silence erodes slowly, but no less fatally. It is the silence of relationships that continue in form but not in depth, where love once lived but no longer breathes.

Those silences wound. They divide in ways that are often invisible to others but deeply felt within. They leave you pacing rooms at night, rehearsing conversations that will never happen. They linger as ghosts of what could have been said but wasn’t. They mark you, sometimes permanently.

And yet, wilderness taught me that silence itself is not the enemy. Silence can be full of presence or stripped by absence. It can be communion or it can be exile. The difference lies in whether it is shared.

With Dexter, silence was alive — a language that needed no translation. With people, silence has sometimes become a wall, an emptiness where love should have lived. Both are real. Both carry meaning.

What I carry now is this: silence is never empty. It is always speaking. The only question is — what is it saying?

Is this silence holding me, or is it pushing me away? Is it an invitation to listen more deeply, or a dismissal that leaves no room to respond? Is it the silence of presence, or the silence of abandonment?

The wilderness taught me that when silence is shared, it becomes a bridge. When it is withheld, it becomes a barrier. The difference can shape not only relationships, but the way we understand our own place in the world.

So I try to sit with silence now, to listen not only with my ears but with my whole being. To notice: does this silence carry life, as the bison’s breath did in the frozen air? Or does it carry loss, like a door closed without reply?

Silence is not silent. It never has been. The challenge is learning to hear what it’s really saying.