What My Dogs Taught Me About Silence

Because sometimes the quiet says what words never could.

My dog has only ever barked for three reasons. He wants something. He needs something. Or he is warning me that something is not right.

That is it. Three reasons for noise. Everything else he has ever told me, he has said in the silence.

I have two. Chanel is a five-pound teacup Yorkie, the kind of small that fits in a coat pocket and somehow still runs the house. And Thor is a sixty-eight-pound goldendoodle who has never once been informed that he is not a lapdog. He is a big baby. As I write this, he is draped across my legs, all sixty-eight pounds of him, because the new house is quiet in a way that unsettles him, and being near me is the only sentence he knows how to say.

He cannot tell me the change is a lot. So he says it with his whole body.

Maybe that is why his quiet has been speaking so loudly to me lately. This new house does not know our rhythms yet. The rooms are still learning our footsteps. I am still learning what my life sounds like when fewer people need me out loud. And in that silence, Thor has become a kind of witness. He does not ask me to explain the ache. He just comes close.

The Looking

Here is what I have noticed after a lifetime of loving animals. The barking is rarely the real conversation. The real conversation is in the looking.

You catch their eyes and you just know. You know when they are anxious. You know when they want to go out, when they are hurting, when they are simply asking to be near you. No words. No translation. Just an understanding that passes between you in the quiet. And somehow, they read you the same way. Thor knows my hard days before I have admitted them to myself. He does not need me to announce it. He just gets closer.

There is a reason that closeness settles me. Sitting with an animal who is calm actually steadies the body, slows the breath, and tells the nervous system it is safe. We were made to find peace in wordless presence. We just forgot, somewhere along the way, that we already speak that language.

How the Quiet Speaks

I think this is why I have been so drawn to silence lately. The new house has a quiet to it that I am still learning, and at first the quiet felt like absence. Now I am starting to hear it differently.

Because so much of the most important communication in my life has never been loud. The deepest knowing rarely arrives as noise. We are taught to expect the booming voice, the dramatic sign, the answer that announces itself. More often, the truest things come the way a dog tells you he loves you. Quietly. In presence. In a steady gaze that asks nothing and offers everything.

I have come to believe God speaks the same way. Not usually in the thunder. In the still, small voice we can only hear once we stop making noise long enough to listen. We spend so much energy waiting to be told out loud, when the message has been sitting in the silence the whole time, patient as a dog at our feet, waiting for us to finally look.

And I have started to notice something about the people God called. Again and again, before He sent them, He drew them into the silence first. Moses spent years in the quiet of the desert before he ever saw the burning bush. Elijah, worn out and afraid, did not find God in the wind or the earthquake or the fire, but in the gentle whisper that came after. Even Jesus withdrew to lonely places, and was led into the wilderness, before the work that mattered most. The silence was not punishment. It was preparation. He pulls the ones He calls into the quiet, because that is where they can finally hear Him.

We forget to pause and see what the silence is saying.

The Grace of Being Greeted Anyway

There is one more thing my dogs do that undoes me a little.

Sometimes we miscommunicate. I misread what they need. They do something I did not ask for. The day gets long and my patience gets short. And none of it matters to them. They still greet me at the door. Every single time. Tails going, whole bodies wagging, no record kept of the moment I got it wrong.

They forgive before I have finished apologizing. The love is unconditional, and it is offered again at the door like the failure never happened. I will be honest, that is a kind of grace I find easier to receive from a dog than to give to the people I love, and easier to give than to believe I am worthy of receiving. The silence between us never holds a grudge. It just holds love, and waits for me to walk back through the door.

Maybe that is the whole lesson. The ones who love us best are not keeping score in the quiet. They are just glad we came home.

Walking Toward the Silence

In a few months I am going to walk across Spain, and I think this is the silence I am walking toward.

Not an empty one. A speaking one. The kind my dogs have been teaching me about my whole life without a single word. I want to spend those long quiet miles the way Thor spends his afternoons in my lap: present, unhurried, trusting that being near is its own kind of conversation.

I am living the title I was given. Silent to Spoken. But I am learning that the silence was never the opposite of being spoken to. It was where the realest things were being said all along.

Maybe that is what this whole season has been. He has a way of pulling the ones He calls into the quiet first, and I am starting to think these long Spanish miles are simply me, finally, answering that ancient call into the silence and trusting that He will speak there too.

So this week, before you reach for more noise to fill it, try sitting in the quiet a minute longer. Look at the ones who love you without words. Let yourself be looked at. See what the silence has been trying to say.

Don’t quit in the quiet.

Pause is power. The deeper we dive, the sweeter it gets. Stay sweet out there.

With love,

- Jenn