The Silence That Walks Beside the Reader

Silence did not arrive suddenly in my life. It did not descend as revelation, nor as discipline learned from books. It came earlier, quietly, the way certain companions appear in childhood and never truly leave — unnoticed at first, indispensable later.
Like many only children, I learned to inhabit absence before understanding company. Afternoons stretched wide and unguarded, populated not by voices but by imagined worlds. I constructed cities no map could contain, universes governed by private laws, landscapes explored entirely within the mind. At the time it felt like play. Only much later did I understand that imagination was merely the visible surface of something deeper: silence learning to take form.
Silence, when one is young, is not emptiness. It is expansion.

The Pythagoreans understood this with a severity modern life rarely tolerates. Initiates entering their school were required to remain silent for years before speaking publicly. Not as punishment, but as preparation. Speech, they believed, must follow understanding — and understanding begins where noise ends. Knowledge was not transmitted through explanation alone but cultivated through attentive stillness, through the slow alignment of perception with harmony.
Silence was the first teacher.

In Eastern traditions, the same intuition appears again and again under different names. Meditation is often imagined as immobility, yet some of its deepest forms unfold in movement — walking, breathing, repeating gestures until action dissolves into awareness. The Hindu ascetic walking endless roads, the Buddhist monk sweeping temple floors, the martial artist repeating forms until intention disappears: all seek the same threshold. The mind ceases to chase the world and begins, instead, to observe it.
Daily life rarely allows this condition. We move inside repetition — schedules, obligations, conversations performed almost automatically. Buddhism calls this Samsara: the wheel of recurrence, not dramatic suffering but ordinary continuity, the subtle exhaustion produced by endless doing. The spirit survives there, but in the background, like a forgotten instrument still resonating beneath louder sounds.
Silence becomes the door through which one briefly steps outside the wheel.

I discovered this consciously at sixteen, though it had been waiting much longer. I had begun writing poems — secretly, for no audience but myself — under the spell of Jorge Luis Borges. His stories felt less like narratives than architectures of thought, cities built from paradox and time. Tlön fascinated me not because it was imaginary, but because it behaved as if imagination itself possessed physical laws.
Reading Borges required a particular stillness. His worlds did not reveal themselves to hurried minds. Time inside those pages seemed suspended, as if meaning existed slightly behind language, accessible only through patient attention. Writing my own verses became a way of entering those labyrinths — keys fashioned from imitation, opening corridors I barely understood.

One afternoon I disappeared entirely into that interior geography. Hours passed unnoticed. School obligations, friendships, appointments — the fragile skeleton of adolescent life — simply dissolved. Only later did I realize I had missed a sports commitment by nearly three hours. I had recently begun practicing judo, discovering balance not only as physical technique but as awareness of weight, center, and breath.
Reality returned abruptly.
My mother entered my room, wearing her favorite black wig — fashionable at the time — looking at me with the cautious suspicion reserved for teenagers who appear too distant from the world. Perhaps she feared substances, rebellion, or some invisible crisis. Instead she found me surrounded by books and silence.
My room had slowly transformed into a private reliquary: novels and poetry by cursed writers stacked unevenly, posters of Cézanne and Manet watching from the walls, Japanese prints whose violent contrasts had once astonished Van Gogh — The Great Wave rising endlessly above my desk. A stereo far too large for the space filled the air with Bob Dylan that day, though on others it carried Mahler’s vast architectures of sound. Small Oceanic figurines rested near the window, inexpensive objects yet echoes of the same primal vision that had reshaped Picasso’s understanding of the human face.
It must have looked less like a bedroom than an unfinished sanctuary.

From those early escapes I never fully returned — nor wished to. Silence had revealed itself not as isolation but as orientation. Sometimes accompanied by music, sometimes absolute, it became a place where thought deepened and perception widened beyond personal concerns toward questions larger than the self: meaning, reality, time.
Years later, when tarot entered my life not as curiosity but as practice, I recognized the same companion waiting beside the cards.
During a reading, silence is not absence of speech. It is a threshold. The everyday mind — hurried, practical, entangled in repetition — gradually loosens its grip. One steps, briefly, outside Samsara. The cards do not speak louder; rather, the reader learns to listen more quietly.

Symbols require calm attention. Archetypes do not reveal themselves to impatience. Only when the mind abandons urgency do the conceptual maps hidden within the cards begin to appear — patterns linking memory, desire, fear, and possibility into a coherent landscape. The reader does not impose meaning; he observes it emerging.
Silence allows the cards to exist before interpretation.
In those moments I feel less like an interpreter than an apprentice standing beside an ancient language. The task is not to speak first, but to wait. To let the images arrange themselves. To allow the symbolic field to breathe.
The same silence that accompanied a solitary child imagining worlds, the same silence cultivated unknowingly through poetry, philosophy, music, and disciplined movement, becomes the invisible partner of every reading.
It walks beside the reader.

And perhaps this is the paradox: tarot is often associated with revelation, yet revelation rarely arrives through intensity. It arrives through quiet attention — the willingness to step back from noise long enough for meaning to surface on its own.
The cards do not demand belief. They ask for listening. In silence, they finally begin to speak.
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