The silent language of beauty: Listening beyond words
The existential psychologist Rollo May published a ton of books while he was alive. I’ve read two: My Quest for Beauty and The Courage to Create.
Rollo May helped develop and popularize existential psychology—a branch of therapy that explores universal aspects of human existence, including concepts like death, freedom, responsibility, and meaning. It’s a psychology that asks us to look beyond the ordinary and to understand life as more than a set of thoughts or verbal expressions.
May believed there’s something deeper within us—a “silent language” that transcends our loquacious chatter and speaks from the core of our being. As he put it, “Beneath our loquacious chatter, there is a silent language of our whole being that yearns for art and the beauty from which art comes.”
It’s a kind of listening, not with our ears but with an openness that extends beyond our rational minds. When we tap into this silent language, we’re not just seeing or hearing beauty; we’re experiencing it as something alive and essential. This yearning, which exists in all of us, invites us to move beyond mere appearances and into something richer, something that reaches to the very source of life itself.
