silence

Silence Like Scouring Sand | Kathleen Dean Moore | Orion Magazine

“Silence is like scouring sand,” he says. “When you are quiet, the silence blows against your mind and etches away everything that is soft and unimportant.” What is left is what is real—pure awareness, and the very hardest questions.

....Many years ago, Gordon was a botany student in Wisconsin. As he was
driving back to school from the West Coast, night came on, and he
stopped to sleep in an Iowa cornfield. Lying on the ground, he listened
to crickets scratch their crisp fiddles and corn stalks rasp against
their leaves. He heard thunder rumble. The crickets and the corn went
silent, and the storm rolled over him. He heard raindrops smack into
soil, and hail rattle the stalks. Then the thunder was growling far
away and crickets were singing again.

How could it be that he had never before heard, really heard, the
sounds of the Earth? From that time forward, how could he do anything
but listen? How should he live his life? “Whatever came next,” he told
me, “had to measure up to the honesty of that night.”

...Astonishment and gratitude are an important part of what the future
stands to lose under the shouting engines of human ambition. When
humans silence nature, drowning out the small voices, we subordinate it
to our own presumed power. Anyone who has felt the oppression in a
classroom or boardroom or marriage when only some are free to speak
will understand what it means to be silenced—to have no voice, to be
seen and not heard, to be told to “pay attention,” which means do not
pay attention to any voice but one.

...But silence? Silence creates an opening, an absence of self, which
allows the larger world to enter into our awareness. It brings us into
contact with what is beyond us, its beauty and mystery. Silence is not
the absence of sounds, but a way of living in the world—an intentional
awareness, an expression of gratitude, to make of one’s own ears, one’s
own body, a sounding board that resonates in its hollow places with the
vibrations of the world.