Leonard Cohen died five years ago yesterday. 

The late song writer once said that his closest friend was his Japanese Zen teacher, Joshu Sasaki Roshi, with whom he studied meditation during a five-year retreat in the late 1990s. Sasaki Roshi spoke hardly any English, and Cohen even less Japanese. Yet they were the closest of friends for over 40 years. Cohen said in an interview with the journalist Pico Iyer that during these 40 years, nothing important was ever left unsaid between them, despite the fact that they hardly ever spoke a word to one another.

How can that be? 

In reflecting back on his interview with Cohen some years later, Iyer said he believed that the extraordinary connection these two men had formed seemed to be the result of the whole-hearted attention they paid to each other – a quality we today call “presence.” It’s the ability to hear the unspoken and see the invisible.

It’s a tribute to the power of silence, to the power of presence.