The Sounds of Silence — ny Lisa Wells
Posted: Fri May 20, 2022 5:02 pm
I was fascinated by this article. Lisa describes her interactions with all sorts of silence except the internal silence necessary to hear the Divine. She is right on the edge but hasn't made the leap.WHEN I WAS a sixteen-year-old naturalist in training, we were instructed to sit in the forest and wait for the return of something called “the baseline symphony.” The baseline symphony was the music of a landscape at ease—the confluence of insect, bird, and animal song, underscored by wind and water. The dynamics of that symphony shifted as day progressed into night. There were brief caesuras, but it did not fall silent for long except in the case of a disturbance. Silence signaled the onset of weather events, a stalking predator, the encroachment of loggers, or the footfalls of a teenager with punk rock looping loudly in her brain. As I picked down the forest path, an unnatural quiet fell, broken only by the occasional bird alarm.
With practice, I learned to still my mind and body long enough for the baseline symphony to return. Insects would take up their strings, their song swelling like groundwater all around me. It was as if my vagus nerve were a dial, tuning me from static to a sublime frequency.
A couple of years later, I sat on a beach in Tulum at midnight, in the strangest quiet of my life. What is this place? I wondered. Then a sudden and obliterating wind sandblasted my face. I spent the next few hours holding down one side of a cabaña, and later slept on the ground beneath it in the eye of a storm. I’d forgotten a basic lesson: where there is life, silence always means.
The Sounds of Silence — by Lisa Wells
https://orionmagazine.org/article/the-s ... f-silence/