Emergence Magazine

 "Silence isn't the absence of something,

but the presence of everything.

When I speak of silence, 

I mean silence from the
noise pollution of modern life,

sounds that have nothing to do

with the natural acoustic system.
...

Silence is the poetics of space,
what it means to be in a place."

- Gordon Hempton

One Square Inch of Silence:
One Man's Search for Natural Silence in a Noisy World

As so often happens when one encounters something one's soul resonates with on a deep level - such as my "accidental" discovery of the film In Pursuit of Silence and its accompanying book Notes on Silence (that I wrote about in a previous post) - other related phenomena soon make their appearance. Case in point: the quote above is taken from Emergence Magazine - or, more precisely, volume 1 of (what I hope is) a series of future publications - which I stumbled across by following up a link to a short essay on Hempton's ongoing efforts on documenting "silence." Since I have abused the adjective "extraordinary" far too many times on my blog (when referring to books and other things I've been touched by) for it to retain any semblance of intended meaning, please take your pick of any of a host of substitutes: exceptional, remarkable, phenomenal, magnificent,...for they all apply. Emergence is a quarterly online magazine that contains essays, interviews, podcasts, and photography on an enormous range of topics at the crossroads of culture, ecology and spirituality. Indeed, it is a veritable treasure trove of textual and visual wisdom, ranging from an homage to the photographic sensibilities of Christian mystic Thomas Merton, to David Abram's musings on animistic engagement with our perceptual world, to the poetic recollections of experiencing the first "Earthrise" from the moon by the Apollo 8 astronauts. But this short list hardly does justice to the wonders you'll find lurking in a Borges' Aleph-like Volume 1's 296 pages! Like In Pursuit of Silence, Emergence Magazine offers gentle guidance and meditative comfort as I struggle to shake the cobwebs off my creative muse. By happy coincidence, just as I was about to close the link I just opened to the online magazine to check that I got it right, I saw that Volume 2 is ready for pre-order! I suspect that those of you who have found something of value on my humble blog will find great - spiritually creative - value in the offerings this online magazine has to offer.