Cadence of Silence

It’s odd we don’t think it’s odd that we regard silence as deficient and not as full. 

We fill the air with talk, music, sports, news and weather updates until we fall exhausted into bed, the sounds of the day still ringing in our heads. Yet we feel unsatisfied because we’ve heard little that we want to remember. We feel empty. In the manner of the Quakers, we should remain silent until we have something important to say.

Doing Nothing, Just Sitting In the Woods

Some days, when’s a lull between the usual rush of activities, I don’t know what to do. I’m restless and look around for something productive to work on. Then I see the woods.

In midwinter, the woods in central Illinois are bare and brown. The sky is generally gray, and on most days there isn’t enough sun to satisfy my cat. Without leaves in the way, I can see a mile over to the next hill where there are more brown trees. Brown doesn’t interest me much. I prefer green.

Cantus

In listening to Arvo Part’s Cantus in Memorium, I am struck by the silence.

Silence is programmed into the score as part of the music. This silence was not absence, of waiting for musicians to play the next notes. It was presence. It was not waiting for something to happen. It was already happening, because we were waiting in the concert hall, and listening.

When we go into nature, we travel with the thousands of thoughts that crowd our head. We enter with the noises of the city ringing in our ears. We have learned to tune out much of what we hear going on around us in our concrete environment.

Hunger for Life

Life is a hunger for Truth, Beauty, and Life. You know, the Big Ticket items. 

We think about this a lot, well, not so much really, mostly after a really long day and we are wondering why we work so hard. Or when we’ve had a little too much to drink and our guard is down.

We really want to know because we’re scared that we took a wrong turn and this is as close to understanding LIFE as we're going to get. There are no big answers, of course, to go with the big questions, only little ones that we fold up and slip into our pockets and pull out now and then to give us a measure of comfort. But we still stare at the beer nuts on the bar trying to decipher their arrangement like tea leaves for divine wisdom.

It may be an unspoken quest of everyone to find these places, these moments, to touch something eternal that will last forever, and then to linger in them for as long as we possibly can.

When I went with my grandfather into nature, we’d row his boat from the Mill Pond through the channel and out to a quiet place on Rock Lake in Wisconsin, put our fishing poles in the water, and sit. Often enough we didn’t catch many fish. We also did not talk much. I think he was teaching me how to listen to nature.

In autumn we’d walk at dawn across the fields and hills, listening to the dry corn shocks rasp against each other in the breeze, and solitary crows call to no one in particular. We’d smell the scent of fall apples in the air, and feel the cold bite of winter approaching.