Cultivating our wisdom is one of our most important tasks. If we don't spend enough time alone listening to the counsel of our hearts, then we will never become wise. If we don't spend enough time in the presence of others who try to walk a path of heart, we will never become wise. If we do not cultivate, through prayer or meditation or spiritual practice, a stronger heart that can fly and endure, then we'll never become wise.
Silence is where we learn to listen, where we learn to see. Holding silence, being held by stillness, people go alone to the wilderness "to stop and see", to renew their vision, to enter the mind ground, to hear the truth, to return to the knowledge of the extensiveness of self and the truth of no self. One seeks solitude to know relatedness. There the unknown, the unarticulated, the unpredictable, the uncontrollable appear as protectors of the present.