What Listens When You Listen?

There is a kind of silence that doesn’t come from the absence of sound. It comes from a stillness that watches you even as you move, that listens as you try to listen. You’ve heard birdsong in the morning, but have you heard the space around the sound? You’ve read words on a page, but have you felt the quiet they emerge from?

Beneath all this doing, beneath even your deepest questions, there is something that doesn’t move. It doesn’t follow, doesn’t push, doesn’t name. It is not your thoughts. It is not your feelings. But it knows them.

The Tao Te Ching says:

“The Tao is the Great Mother: empty yet inexhaustible. It gives birth to infinite worlds.”

You cannot see it. You cannot hold it. But you can be held by it, in moments when you stop trying to understand, and simply fall inward.

what listens when you listen? what sees when your eyes close?

there is a depth that isn’t deep, a vastness that isn’t wide, it holds you not with arms, but with absence,

it is the silence behind the spoken, the stillness inside the motion, the watcher within the watching,

you cannot remember it, because it never left, you cannot search for it, because it has no direction,

And yet, in rare, unguarded moments, it comes like a breath you forgot you were breathing,

it arrives without arrival, and somehow, you remember.

Let this not be something you read. Let it be something that reads you. Let the stillness behind the words speak louder than the lines themselves. Let the question keep echoing long after you close this page:

What listens when you listen?

Not for you to answer but for you to notice, when all else is quiet.

If a fragment stirred something real in you, feel free to leave a trace below. Or better yet, follow the silence wherever it takes you.

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© 2025 Beyond Silence. Written by 'the one listening'.

If shared, please credit with care.