Hey friend, and thank you for being here for today’s episode. I’m Mary, and I hope you’re doing well whenever and wherever you’re listening.
If you are a regular listener of the pod, you may have noticed that there wasn’t an episode last month, and that there also wasn’t any kind of newsletter message about the missing episode. (But, if you didn’t notice, I get that, because the whole linear time thing continues to feel really non-linear lately.)
I’ve released episodes a bit late before, and I did even skip a month back in December due to an over-full work and life schedule. But last month was the first time that I just… didn’t do the podcast. No episode, no newsletter check-in. And it’s not because of any work- or life-related reason. I just didn’t have an idea for an episode topic last month.
This hasn’t happened before in the 2 1/2 years of the podcast—one of the reasons this is a monthly pod instead of the usual weekly or biweekly schedule is that when I started this project, I knew I would struggle to have a fully formulated topic every week. That’s just not the way my brain works. But I was pretty sure I would always have a topic every month.
Enter June, with no topic idea. And also with no particular angst or urgency or alarm about that lack of an idea. Just, nothing I wanted to say in this container at that particular time.
This is not my way of announcing the end of the Inspirited Word. (Or at least, I don’t think it is.) But this is my way of acknowledging that the Inspirited Word may be wanting to shift into new patterns, or even maybe new forms. I don’t know yet—maybe June was a fluke, and I’ll be back to having an idea every month that manifests as a 25-to-35-minute pod episode with a writing practice to go along with it in the newsletter.
Or maybe things will continue to feel different. Maybe this project will even start to feel complete (in which case, I promise not to disappear without a sign-off).
For this month, though, I do have something I wanted to share with you here, and it flows out of both last month’s unplanned gap in programming and out of an episode from this spring. In April I talked about a creative and magical framework called the Witches’ Pyramid—and one of the four key concepts in that framework is the principle of being silent, as an active and vital component of creating something in the world.
“To be silent” can be taken literally, but that’s only one possible dimension of it. Sort of like how there are versions of meditation that are literally silent and still, and others that use movement or sound to get more silent internally. So when I say “silence” throughout this episode, I’m talking about that more flexible or expansive definition.
To be silent is to keep certain powerful things to and for yourself, and it’s also the ability to dial back your internal noise and pick up on powerful things from outside yourself. In the context of writing, it’s practicing letting a story speak to and through you as you create it. It’s paying attention to what emerges from writing, even when you’re not sharing what you write. It’s paying attention to what emerges when you’re not writing at all.
One of the recurring themes that I created this podcast to explore is the idea of stories as living spirits—as creative forces or beings that we are in relationship with through our creative craft. And for the past couple weeks, I’ve been thinking about what it means to be in relationship with silence—to practice silence both as a way of tending our connections to stories and as a way of connecting with the spirit of silence itself.
As always, feel free to interpret the idea of a “spirit” in whatever way fits your own brain and experiences: literal, metaphorical, archetypal, neurological. This podcast is not about any sort of creative spiritual dogma; I think you can experience something like the spirit of silence without rejecting either science or any religious beliefs you may or may not hold.
My own ideas about what a spirit is shift and change almost constantly. But I keep coming back to this nebulous spirit stuff because whenever I’m able to access that feeling of relationship and encounter—that feeling of making something abstract more tangible and alive—it changes things. It opens up new perspectives on what’s possible in my life; it opens up space for me to just exist and create without control and judgment.
If silence is a being with its own life, then we can create things together. I don’t have to fill the silence, I just have to meet it and respond to it.
One of the things I’ve been mulling over lately, though, is that there are different kinds of silence that we might find ourselves experiencing. And if that’s the case, then one of the ways we can practice being silent in our creative lives is to choose which spirits of silence we want to actively be in relationship with. To choose which spirits of silence to befriend more deeply.
I’ve been thinking about this partly because of a book I read back in May called The Spiral Staircase, by Karen Armstrong. Armstrong is a British author who writes about comparative religion, and a lot of her work focuses on compassion as a central practice across faith traditions, and as a vital part of secular society. Before becoming a writer, she spent seven years as a Catholic nun when she was in her early twenties, and The Spiral Staircase is her memoir of leaving the monastic life and reintegrating into the secular world.
To be completely honest, this book wasn’t like my favorite memoir ever; I think spiritual memoirs can feel like they’re writing around the central experience of losing or finding faith without fully touching on the experience itself, and some parts of this book feel like that to me. Which makes sense, really—it’s hard enough to write good memoir without adding on stuff like the ineffable presence or absence of god.
The book definitely has its great moments, though, and one of the sections I did really like deals with silence as part of both the spiritual life and the creative life.
Here’s how Armstrong describes the essential power of silence, for both the mystic and the writer:
"Silence and solitude strip away a skin; they break down that protective shell of heartlessness which we cultivate in order to prevent ourselves from being overwhelmed by the suffering of the world that presses in upon us on all sides." (end quote)
Essentially, when we practice silence (literally or more internally), we make it possible to shed the armor that is so often required to exist in the world—an armor made up of both the noisy demands of daily survival and the noise we create to distract ourselves from those demands (whether we’re conscious of it or not).
Armstrong was a nun during the 1960s, and she writes about how she entered the religious life in order to experience the transformative, transpersonal power of silence, but instead found herself ground down by the woefully outdated, intentionally traumatic Catholic system of that era. Within that world, her experience of contemplative silence became both punitive and ironically self-involved. Instead of creating space for transcendence, silence in the convent only created an endless, hypervigilant sense of failure that drove her deeper into herself (not to mention making her hate herself).
She says it took decades of life back in the secular world to rediscover what silence could be—and this rediscovery was in the context of her writing practice, while she was researching and drafting one of her books.
Here's how she puts it:
"Now I was beginning to understand that a silence that is not clamorous with vexation and worried self-regard can become part of the texture of your mind, can see into you, moment by moment, and gradually change you. ...I could immerse myself in the silence, allow it to open up wide spaces in my head, and listen to the undercurrent of these new ideas. ... I would feel stirred deeply within, and taken beyond myself, in much the same way as I was in a concert hall or theater." (end quote)
Armstrong’s experiences are a perfect example of two different spirits of silence and/or two different relationships to silence. When we set out to cultivate any kind of contemplative practice, whether that’s daily prayer or a writing routine, we tend to encounter a type of silence that’s filled with expectation, with a desire to meet certain parameters we think will prove that we’ve succeeded in accessing something meaningful (or even transcendent).
One of the benchmarks Karen Armstrong mentions from her convent days is the Catholic theological concept of “consolation”—a peaceful sense of the immanent presence of God in the moment. Consolation is supposed to sort of come upon you, usually through the act of prayer, and draw you closer to God’s will without force or conscious direction.
This maybe isn’t the way a theologian would describe it, but to me it calls up that metaphor of trying to catch a fish with your hands: If you try too hard, the fish will always slip away from you, but you’d better be out there standing in the river with your hands open every morning or it’ll definitely never happen.
Armstrong describes her continual struggles with the rigid forms of prayer she was required to follow as a nun. And she also describes encountering a dismissive disbelief when she tried to admit to other Sisters that she had still not yet experienced consolation. Like, not ever, despite standing out there in the silent river for literal hours every day, desperately trying to ignore the increasing sense that her failure to catch the fish was an indicator of something broken in her soul.
This is the kind of silence I think a lot of us encounter in difficult phases of our creative lives—a silence that’s “clamorous with vexation and worried self-regard,” to borrow Armstrong’s description. We show up for our craft but just end up staring expectantly at a page that seems to be filled not with possibility but with the echoing, damning emptiness of our utter lack of imagination and inner life. And then we wonder why we have trouble continuing to show up faithfully.
If this kind of silence has a spirit—or is a spirit—then I think it’s a spirit nobody can completely excise from their life. Some days that’s just the river you find yourself standing in. But it’s not a spirit of silence that I personally want to keep actively cultivating a relationship with.
I’d much rather put energy and effort and feeling into building a relationship with that second spirit of silence Karen Armstrong talks about—the silence that opens you up as you immerse yourself in it. The silence that can see into you and take you beyond yourself. Silence as a co-creator.
I’m going to repeat that first quote I shared from The Spiral Staircase, just because it’s been a few minutes since I said it and I’m about to reference it directly again.
“Silence and solitude strip away a skin; they break down that protective shell of heartlessness which we cultivate in order to prevent ourselves from being overwhelmed by the suffering of the world.”
If we want to create, we have to strip away that protective skin, because it keeps out both the suffering of the world and the full beauty of the world as well. That’s not exactly a groundbreaking bit of creative advice, so I won’t belabor it. But I will say that if we accept that we have to strip away the protective shell, then it’s really helpful to do so in the company of allies instead of enemies. And that’s one of the benefits of relating to things like creativity and silence as spirits with life, beings you encounter. You get to make those spirits your allies.
If silence is your ally, you can release the protective shell without taking on undue emotional or mental anxiety or harm. You can get past all that vexed or desperate self-regard and practice a kind of creative ego-death—without feeling like maybe you’re actually going to die. You can stand out in the river with your skin off and catch the fish instead of getting eaten by it.
So, all this leads to a question: How do you make silence your ally? How do you welcome in a spirit of silence you feel both held by and stretched by?
One way of making silence your ally is just to get more comfortable with it. And that requires allowing silence to happen – allowing there to be more space in your daily life to encounter silence and to listen to that silence (metaphorically or literally).
There’s no shortage of commentary around lately about reducing media consumption and screen time (see the thoroughly meme-ified injunction to “touch grass”). For all of 2025 thus far, my youtube feed has been full of 50-min video essays on the discourse of logging off (with varying degrees of self-awareness on the irony there). And I actually talked about information overload and dysregulation here on the pod back in February.
The value of reducing input when you’re trying to cultivate a relationship with the spirit of silence is pretty self-explanatory, so I don’t think you need me to tell you why or how to do that. But there’s another angle to explore that’s more about the way you approach the media and information you do consume – so that’s where I want to go with the rest of this episode.
In order to nurture a relationship with a creative spirit of silence, I think reducing the amount of input in your life is a great place to start. But you have to do more than that. You have to discover ways to practice silence while actively taking stuff in, while you’re in the act of engaging and expressing, not just when you’re taking a mental pause.
This is what Armstrong talks about in that passage about finding a new kind of silence within her writing practice, a silence she describes as a “strange and beautiful texture.” When she discovered that new texture of silence, she was in the middle of researching and drafting a nonfiction book, so she was taking in huge amounts of new information and input every day. She wasn’t exactly just hanging out touching grass. So that’s not the kind of silence she was experiencing.
Armstrong also uses the metaphor of reading poetry to explain the new way she found herself approaching studying and writing. Here’s the passage:
“You have to open yourself to a poem with a quiet, receptive mind, in the same way as you might listen to a difficult piece of music. ... You have to give it your full attention, wait patiently upon it, and make an empty space for it in your mind. And finally the work declares itself to you, steals deeply into your being, line by line, note by note, phrase by phrase, until it becomes part of you forever. … If you bring your own personal agenda to bear upon it, the poem will close upon itself like a clam, because you have denied its unique and separate identity, its own inviolable holiness.” (end quote)
It’s that act of releasing your “personal agenda” that seems to be the key here, that mental posture of open and open-ended responsiveness. You have to allow your own receptive silence to eclipse your expectations, or you won’t be able to apprehend and appreciate the full reality of whatever you’re trying to pay attention to.
And when you’re seeking to create something out of this encounter, you have to also meet your own creative expression with the same lack of predetermined agenda, the same willingness to leave the end result open, to respond rather than direct.
In addition to this pod’s running theme about building a relationship with your creativity, there’s also a common thread of learning how to have writing goals without letting them seep into the actual practice of writing. And as it turns out, Armstrong’s account of discovering a deeper, more generative spirit of silence is another example of that.
The writing project she talks about in this portion of the memoir did in fact have an agenda connected to it: She was writing a nonfiction book under contract with a publisher, complete with deadlines and other external parameters and expectations that could very easily cause creative flow to “close upon itself like a clam,” as she says. So it’s clearly possible to release personal agendas and encounter that co-creative spirit of silence even when you actually do have some very concrete and important benchmarks to meet.
For Karen Armstrong, the secret to this trick seems to be in the practice of study; she’s a nonfiction author who is usually writing in response to religious and historical texts, and that’s where she’s able to make that pivotal shift to release all the ego stuff, all the agendas. As she puts it, “I was finding in study the ecstasy that I had hoped to feel as a young nun.”
According to Armstrong, the purpose of contemplative study isn’t to amass knowledge that can prove any particular point or belief. The practice of studying is itself the purpose. Here's how she puts it in the context of her field of comparative religion: “If you are bent on proving that your own tradition alone is correct, and pour scorn on all other points of view, you are injecting self and egotism into your study, and the texts will remain closed.”
By approaching study as a contemplative practice, and by tying all her work back to that attitude of deep, receptive attention to what she’s studying, she’s able to bypass the limits of personal ego. And although she doesn’t state this directly, the memoir implies that this practice of study also helps her coexist creatively with the very real goals and demands of being a professional writer.
Maybe you’re not a nonfiction writer, or at least not the kind who does a lot of long-term research for a single specific project. I’m certainly not that kind of writer. But I think this idea of contemplative study can help any writer get more comfortable with the spirit of silence, regardless of whether or not you do formal “studying.”
Here are a couple things I’m trying lately that might be useful for you, too. First, I’m trying to take notice of what kinds of input and media naturally draw me into a more contemplative mode—into that internal space where things open instead of closing in, where I can more easily receive insights and ideas from beyond the ego noise. This is the mental space where I can start meeting the spirit of silence as an ally, instead of as some sort of stern Mother Superior figure who’s come to judge me on my progress toward transcendence.
I suspect that taking note of what kinds of input make me naturally contemplative—and prioritizing that input over other kinds of media—will first of all just make my daily life more pleasant and meaningful (which I think we could all use right about now). And I’m sure it will give me more ideas to bring into my creative work. But I’m also hoping it will help me be more silent, receptive, and responsive when I’m actually writing, because that kind of silence will just be more familiar to me.
The second thing I’m trying out lately is actually spending time being silent right before I start a creative session—like, I’ve literally been setting a five-minute timer after I open the document or get out my art supplies. To proactively get in touch with silence before I encounter it in the wild, so to speak.
It’s an extremely simple practice, maybe even so simple it doesn’t sound worth doing. But I think big internal changes often do look deceptively simple on the surface. I mean, yeah, you can chase transcendence by running away to the forest or the mountaintop or the monastery (and believe me, I definitely get the appeal). But finding creative transcendence can be way more subtle than that—and way more accessible than that.
It can start with a five-minute timer. With anything that extends an invitation to the spirit of silence who’s your ally, instead of the one who’s not.
Thanks for sharing this space with me today; if you’re a newsletter subscriber, check your inbox for the follow-up tip to go along with the episode.
This month’s tip came out of an idea that ended up not really fitting into the episode itself—I had this whole bit clarifying how to relate to abstract ideas as spirits and why that can be really helpful. But I realized as I working on it that it would be way more effective as a journal prompt that can be personal to you, instead of filtering it through my perspective. So if you’re into the concept of befriending the spirit of silence, but it also sounds a bit slippery to put into practice, then this month’s tip is for you. (And it’s quick to do.)
If you’re not yet a newsletter subscriber, here’s your invitation to scroll down in the show notes wherever you’re listening and hit the link to join. You’ll get access to all monthly episode tips, and you’ll also get a special subscriber resource kit as well, with three tools you can use again and again to access more flow and freedom in your writing practice.
And lastly, there’s a bit of a personal creative update in the newsletter today as well. I’ve mentioned in some previous episodes that I started writing poetry again over the past year or so, after many years away from that genre, and I have work published this month in two different online poetry journals. Both are free to access, and I’ve put links in the newsletter—so if you’ve been curious about my writing outside the pod, now’s your chance!
Thanks again for being here, and as always, keep well, keep writing, and I’ll see you in the next episode.