Over time, we as a species learned to trust the song of birds. Their melodies became a subtle reassurance a signal that no predator lurked nearby, that all was well in the world. But just as surely, we learned to fear the sudden silence. That hush in the canopy meant something was coming. A presence. A threat. Doom made known through absence.
Lately, I sense a similar silence among the artists and writers of my generation. It’s not that we’ve vanished, but that our songs have those brave, expressive gestures that once reached toward beauty or truth. In their place is a quiet suspension, as if we are holding our breath, watching. There is a kind of stillness, not born of peace, but of stunned attention.
Perhaps it is because the most meaningful things of our time are also the most dreadful. We look on, transfixed and shaken, as culture bends around us warped by spectacle, by violence, by a hollowing out of meaning. And in this distortion, the most impactful forces seem to be those that do the most damage: to our society, to our sanity, to our sense of self.
We are not silent out of apathy. We are silent out of recognition. We feel the tremor in the leaves before the beast breaks through. And maybe we are not yet ready to sing again. Or maybe the next song must be entirely new one born not from what we’ve lost, but from what we now must face.
We find ourselves in a moment where the most visible things what fills our feeds, our headlines, our daily conversations are often the most hollow. The loudest forces are not the deepest, and yet they demand our attention like fire demands oxygen. There is a kind of hypnosis in the spectacle, and many of us have fallen under it myself included. But beneath that trance, a deeper truth stirs.
What we must now face is this: that our role as creators, as artists, as storytellers, is not ornamental. It is essential. We are not background noise. We are not decoration. We are part of the nervous system of this world, interpreting its pain, translating its hopes, stitching together a sense of continuity in times when everything feels fractured and untethered.
And perhaps though it feels almost blasphemous to say it may be that our work, our quiet making, our thoughtful witnessing, is more important than the events themselves. Because events pass. Empires collapse. Algorithms change. But the way we remember, the way we make meaning of what has happened — that lives on. That becomes the echo. That becomes the myth.
So maybe the silence we feel now is not an ending, but a drawing back. A preparation. A collective inhale before the next movement. Because when we do return to the song, it must not be a mimicry of what came before. It must carry the gravity of this moment. It must remind us who we are — not just what is happening to us, but what we are still capable of imagining into being.
And that is no small task. But it is ours.
For those who have chosen to be the thinkers and storytellers of a generation we have something deeply profound to attempt to interpret.
If our conscious mind registers only the faintest trace of what reality truly is an imperceptible flicker amid a vast, unknowable sea then the stories we tell ourselves become not just narratives, but instruments of navigation.
The human brain, in its miraculous constraint, sifts through a deluge of data millions of signals per second yet allows through only the tiniest threadbare stream into our awareness. We are wanderers in a cathedral of sensation, and yet we walk blindfolded, guided not by the fullness of the world, but by a sliver thin as breath.
What enters our conscious mind is not the truth of the world, but the suggestion of it. A whisper shaped by survival. A curated illusion. And so, the stories we construct the meanings we assign, the identities we fashion, the hopes we carry are not mere entertainments. They are architecture. They shape the contours of the real more than the raw data ever could.
If we are indeed dancing on the skin of a reality we barely touch, then the gravity of self-narrative becomes sacred. We must become stewards of our myths, architects of meaning with reverence for what we cannot yet see. For it may be that the world is not made of atoms, but of attention and the way we direct that attention is the most powerful act of creation we will ever know.
If that is true then the only thing that is true about it is that the fraction of reality that we do interpret is what is processed or considered and it is only what we endeavor to think which becomes part of our reality. That is such a small fragment of what IS, and is interpreted by our minds to begin with but then what stories we make from what is interpreted becomes the evidence we give to our collective future.
So I am suggesting that we sing together and flock together in this turbulent tumult of collective desire coupled with despair. We can each consider our own voice in the chorus or alone in the dark but our song is important and perhaps more important than reality itself.
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Harrison Love is an Artist and Author living in New York, more of his work can be found online at
