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Posts by Tony Collins

Edward “Tony” Collins, EdD, MFA, is a documentary filmmaker, writer, educator, and disability advocate living with progressive vision loss from macular degeneration. His work explores presence, caregiving, resilience, and the quiet power of small moments. He is currently completing books on creative scholarship and collaborative documentary filmmaking and shares personal essays about meaning, hope, and disability on Substack. Connect: substack.com/@iefilm | iefilm.com

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The Power of Silence and How to Really Listen

“The silence between the notes is as important as the notes themselves.”  ~Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

When I was younger, I thought knowledge was something you could capture—something you could write down, measure, and prove. I believed that to understand something, I had to explain it. And for a long time, I tried.

But then, life—through film, through music, through long conversations with people whose wisdom couldn’t be found in books—taught me something else: the most powerful truths don’t always come in words. They exist in the space between them.

I learned this lesson in the mountains, where the sky stretches …