With my rent miraculously taken care of, my life went deeply inward. I hardly spoke for over a year. Many visitors came, sat in silence, and left. Sometimes I spoke, but mostly I did not. The unwritten rule seemed to be that I would not speak out of discomfort or fear of silence. I would speak only when I felt that somehow a compassionate word might help someone I was with. Fasting, silence, and reading defined my life for several years... I didn't know if I was giving myself to foolishness or saintliness.
May each one you meet along life's path feel through you a great inner stillness and reserve, a great strength. Then when you speak, your words will carry power to those who hear. Allow the words you speak to well up from your inner being and see how little your physical self is drained. In using only necessary words and words of truth, you are known as a "Silent One." Love will flow through you from that silence and others will go forth full of the love you have given to them.
For, to love another is to address to that person the most powerful and imperious form of appeal. It is to stir up in his or her depths a silent and hidden person forced to emerge in response to our voice, so new that even its owner did not know it, yet so true that he or she cannot fail to recognize it, even though seeing it for the first time.