Silence - pure nothingness - is a Cross at the center of the world, out of which all things continually emerge.

"I have an obligation to preserve the stillness, the silence, the poverty, the virginal point of pure nothingness which is at the center of all other loves.  I cultivate this plant silently in the middle of the night and water it with psalms and prophecies in silence.  It becomes the most beautiful of all the plants in the garden, at once the primordial paradise plant, the axis mundi [center of the world], the cosmic axle, and the Cross."

Thomas Merton

Photo: Tufted Evening-Primrose and Checkerboard Mesa at sunrise, Zion National Park, UT; May 28, 2012.  Notice how Merton connects silence with the Cross.  For in that place of stillness where all words die away, everything is reborn - "resurrected" - as though out of nowhere ("pure nothingness").