To know that you do not know is
the highest knowledge.
To think you know when you don't
is more common.
Consummate skill appears effortless
It is accompanied by restraint
Effort is focused where it has
Maximum impact.
To speak little is wisdom.
Rooted in quietude.
Stillness is the master of movement.
Deep in northern Canadian wilderness
I once came across a native elder.
He was sitting by a river
watching the water move.
I did not disturb his peace
I did not say hello.
What the Quiet Ones Know
Reflection
There is a kind of knowing that arrives only in silence. Not the silence of an empty room, but the silence of two people who can express their friendship and love for each other without words.
The elder by the river was not waiting for company. He was in conversation with the natural forces that surround, the one that comes only from a long and intimate experience of wild nature. To have spoken would have been to interrupt with something smaller.
I have spent much of my life learning when not to speak. It isn’t easy. The impulse to fill a quiet with a word, a greeting, an introduction of oneself — this is the ego asking to be noticed. The quiet ones have mastered that impulse.
What they know is best expressed through silence. In quiet, the mind settles.
. . .
Question to consider:
Would the quality of your life be enhanced by more thought and fewer words?
This poem draws from the Tao Te Ching and the tradition of the Taoist hermit monks of the Zhongnan Mountains — a lineage of silence, restraint, and knowing that cannot be spoken. The Tao Te Ching calls this knowing zhi — not information, but a settled recognition that comes before words.
