Good morning Gentle Reader; let us continue our exploration.
In addition to what I shared with you in PART I, I am also able to find and enter a place of ‘Silence’ when I set aside (or ignore) all that is artificial or invented in the ‘world of sound’. For example, I focus on observing and listening to that which nature presents me. The great poet John Keats captures this when he writes:
I stood tiptoe upon a little hill. The air was cooling and so very still… And then there crept a little noiseless noise among the leaves born of the very sight that silence heaves… Linger a while upon some bending planks that lean against a streamlet’s rushy banks… How silent comes the water round that bend. Not the minutest whisper does it send.
For me, this experience enables me to set aside the artificial noises and enables me to open a space for silence to enter into my very being and find a place to rest a while.
I grew up in the Nature that permeates Wisconsin. Nature is alive with sound – the music of the wind and birds, the creaking of tree limbs, the sound of water caressing the shore. These sounds are different from – and more desirable than – the screeching of tires, the blasting of horns, the vibration that a semi-truck generates as it lumbers past you. For me, Lord Byron captures nature when he writes:
There is a pleasure in the pathless woods. There is rapture on the lonely shore. There is society where none intrudes, by the deep Sea, and music in its roar; I love not man less, but Nature more.
In the early 1970s folk music was on the rise – in some places it had truly risen to new heights. I became friends with a trio of folk singers, their collective name was ‘Chestnut Dawn.’ On one occasion I was invited to join the three of them and a few others into their sound-proof studio. We gathered together for a long conversation. We prepared ourselves by sitting in silence for twenty minutes. As the silence grew we became aware of the sounds that the building was making – we heard the walls shift, we heard popping and cracking as the building moved. It was if the very building was restless or it was striving to take a step or two.
As I recall this experience of sitting in silence I am reminded of the words of Thomas Merton:
Be still. Listen to the stones of the wall. Be silent, they try to speak your Name. Listen to the living walls. Who are you? Who are you? Whose Silence are You? Who (the quiet) are you (as the stones are quiet)?
‘Silence’ speaks out of the world of walls. Thomas Merton was a Trappist Monk. As a Monk he was charged with discerning what was useless and harmful from what was use-full and nurturing and strove to choose the latter two and ‘in all things glorify God.’
Searcher-Seeker 