In defense of nothing to say

It’s not that I don’t want to speak. It’s that words don’t always arrive where the meaning lives.

I wasn’t a very verbal child. Or teen. Who am I kidding—I’m not a very verbal adult either. If I could communicate in sound, image, the press of body into another, or by making silly shapes in space, I would. Maybe that’s why I fell in love with dance. Why I chose photography and film long before I ever dared write.

The irony isn’t lost on me—here I am, writing an essay. About how words, spoken or written, sometimes fail. Or simply aren’t enough.

There’s nothing quite like transcending time and space through story—I’ll grant words that much. But still, I often feel them falter midair. Like in my only flying dream to date: I lifted off the ground—at last! flight!—only to crash, arms and legs and hair a knotted nebula, into the crooked arms of a tree.

It’s not that I don’t want to speak. It’s that words don’t always arrive where the meaning lives.

So I suppose this is my truce with language: not to use it to explain everything, but to gesture toward the unsayable. To cup it gently—like the time I held a hummingbird in my hands, dazed and panting after it trapped itself in the garage. For a moment, it pulsed against my palms like a living stanza. It’s fine follicles echoing my own. But I couldn’t grasp its fullness until I let it go. Only in flight—lifting beyond me into the sky—did its unlanguaged meaning arrive. Not as message, but as field. A resonance I could only receive through release.

One of my favorite Substack writers

rebecca hooper

puts it this way: Language has always fascinated and frustrated me because I cannot reliably grasp it. It rivers and lakes, floods and droughts, slips and stops. It lets me enter other worlds, even create new ones, but it does not always let me share my own.

I know that feeling. Too often, I’m standing on the shoreline of expression, catching only glimmers of what I mean to say as it rushes past. Like particles whose meaning shifts the moment we observe them, words collapse under the pressure of being named. What’s left is wave—gesture, gaze, breath. The wingbeat of something true, just beyond the mind’s grasp.

Some things we can only point to—like a child reaching toward the sky. Not to grab it, but to show you what she sees. Look past her hand. Follow the reach. Watch how she scatters awe, as if to say, Look! Look how everything is love.

At the dinner table growing up, words were plentiful. Mom, Dad, and brother Eric tossed ideas across the table like hot potatoes. I was often found beneath it instead—nestled into my own subterranean lab, conducting research on planted feet, sewing-machine knees, and napkin-fussing fingers. Psychology students studying family dynamics should be required to spend a semester under dinner tables. That’s where the real communication happens.

When I’d emerge from my underworld, blinking into the brightness, the world’s messaging felt too much. Too loud. Too fast. And… off. I understood what was being said, but the human habit of saying one thing while feeling another bewildered me. I couldn’t reconcile the split between voice and flesh, between what’s spoken and what’s pulsing just beneath it.

We are such a wordy species, placing so much value on articulation. On having something to say. And yet, the simplest question—“How are you?”—often sends me into spirals, silenced by the impossibility of distilling a moment’s entire narrative arc into a single phrase. And what if once it’s delivered, it’s no longer true?

Sometimes all I want is not to explain but to be met; a warm hand, a kind gaze, a chest to lean against delivers the message—soft and clear.

Probably why I get a little grabby with my cats.

This need—for wordless presence—is something artist Marina Abramović calls “immaterial energy.” In her performance The Artist Is Present, she sat silently in a wooden chair at the Museum of Modern Art for more than 700 hours, offering what she called “unconditional love” to strangers who sat across from her, one at a time. More than half a million people visited the gallery. Many cried. Some said they had never felt more deeply seen—and not a single word exchanged.

We all long to feel seen. But do words really illuminate, revealing what was hidden? Or are they more like a beam of light in deep space—brilliant, yes, but narrow—only tracing one path through the dark, while everything else remains just out of view?

Recently, I listened to a paradigm-shifting podcast, The Telepathy Tapes, in which journalist Ky Dickens explores the lives of non-speaking autistic children—children whose families have come to understand that they are communicating powerfully, just not in the ways we’re used to recognizing. Through a trusted teacher or parent—sometimes even through one another across continents—they share knowledge, feeling, memory, even glimpses of what’s to come. As one boy says to his mother, “I’m not reading your mind—my consciousness isn’t reading your consciousness. It’s simply that we are the same consciousness.”

Some even describe a shared place they visit—a kind of inter-dimensional meeting ground they call The Hill. It exists beyond geography, beyond bodies—a space where understanding doesn’t pass from one to another but rises up between them, already known. It’s as if they don’t meet on The Hill. They meet as it. They don’t need words to share their inner lives. They don’t need a mouth to speak books. They are living, it seems, outside of linear time and three-dimensional space, where language is not a bridge but a bottleneck—a crude tool, where a more refined communion is possible. Their silence is not absence. It is signal. Transmission.

Some even describe it as love. Not sentiment. Not a feeling passed back and forth. But something steadier, something that surrounds and precedes. Love as connective tissue, yes. But also: love as field itself. The medium everything moves through. The fabric that holds the meaning, even when the message dissolves.

As Mom ages, I find myself wondering if something similar happens at the other end of life. We call it dementia, Alzheimer’s—categorize it as loss, vacancy, absence—but what if that’s because we’re trying to reach her using a number no longer in service? A landline, when she’s moved on to quantum signal—no dialing, no voice to carry, just connection through this expanding, law-defying, field we don’t yet understand.

On a recent trip to Mexico, a circle of family surrounded her. She spoke very few words—at first disconcerting after decades of her booming Leo life-force. While we lazed on a sunny beach, tossing stories around like a beach ball, Mom sat quietly amongst us, only occasionally catching and passing, but mostly hearing the blue-sky everlasting beyond it that birthed those stories, gave them buoyancy and freedom and life.

On our final night together, we gathered for dinner at a long table. Toasts were offered, words of gratitude spilled from the heart-shaped mouth of her grandson. We sat, made shapes with our mouths; the meal became story in the telling. Conversational pairs formed, reformed, plates arrived, glasses emptied, voices—even tears—swelled, softened. The fires of vocal communication were alive and well, a hearth as old as the human desire to belong.

But it wasn’t until the long meal was over—when we rose, then gathered, then huddled our arms and bodies around her small frame—that something else expanded. Heads bowed, like petals of a daisy closing for the night, we stopped talking. So many words—four hours, seven days, a lifetime—suddenly insufficient, surrendering into their hushed, ineffable, origin.

So instead of asking her to speak, we leaned in. Her diaphragm more feather than flesh. We pressed ourselves into her quiet, feeling it ripple outwards, like the fabric of space-time stretching into her children, her grandchildren, the universe. Listening, we hear everything:

She isn’t becoming silent. She is becoming love.

This image captured by the Hubble Space Telescope shows love expanding from its gray-haired source