Creating Silence, Seeking Quiet

Creating Silence, Seeking Quiet

Dec 18, 2023


One thing I miss the most as I get older is finding that sound of silence.  I took a nature walk out in a forest preserve not too far from where I live.  The sound of cars on the highway, trains on the track, jets on their approach to O’Hare all intruded.  A bluejay’s strident call was barely audible over the din that is everyday urban life.  I marveled at the fact that animals, it seems, have been able to make some accommodations to noise.  However, research points out that not only animals, but humans are affected by the preponderance of noise.  I am guilty of wishing to fly on a jet, drive a car, ride a train, listen to music, work on my house and a myriad of other things that lend to noise.  My walk in the woods was as much compromised by my actions as anyone else.  

It made me think of the few, very few times in my life when I had heard nothing but silence.  Once out in Wyoming, during April in the Buffalo Valley.  My siblings had gone into the cabin, but I remained outside during a snowstorm.  I leaned against an aspen tree and listened to what sounded like air rushing past my eardrums. It had a musical hum to it and I remember thinking “this is what quiet sounds like.”   

I have been in other places, man-made, where the sound of silence is even more silent than the outdoors.  Such as New Melleray Abbey near Cascade, Iowa.  This abbey is built for silent retreats and the church is made of thick slabs of area limestone.  I sat in a pew and could hear nothing.  No wind, no birds, no cars on the road.  But it was something, my mind told me.  It was the sound of the absence of sound. In the stillness of the abbey space, no air rushed past my ears like all those years ago.  It was immensely peaceful, and I felt all at once sleepy, contemplative and insignificant in an odd way.  It dawned on me that we humans can create silence. And silent it was, until a monk came in and like a cannon shot, the silence was disturbed by the slight opening and closing of a door. 

Those moments of relishing the quiet of nature and the silence of man have ebbed away for me over the years.  Sadly, I have slight tinnitus that affects my ears from either getting older, playing music or some other type of repetitive sound that changed my ability to listen.  But still, in spite of these limitations, the idea of being in a state of natural quiet or man-made silence is something I yearn for at times. 

Very few of us humans are able to create silence. Musicians can when composing pieces that have rests in them.  Architects and builders ultimately can create a space for silence.  But for the majority of us, our activity defines who we are.  

As much as there are times I crave the idea of silence, I also sometimes feel agitated when things are silent.  Then, I have the noise inside my head, the thoughts and ideas that well up non-stop in my human brain. Those require an effort to get them to quiet down, to become still. To achieve that, I tend to head out to where I think I can attain natural quiet.  Where the birdsong, the wind in the trees are reminders of my being alive, but observantly so.   Thus, it is quiet that I believe is the essential ingredient for man, bird and animal to achieve some level of peaceful balance.  How wonderful it will be when humans are able to end not only the change of climate, but the auditory change of the world, as well.  To go back to when things were truly and wonderfully, quiet. 

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