Profound Silence

The day Gerry and I moved to Neenah from Milwaukee was a long, exhausting one. Done in from moving boxes and furniture all day, we fell into bed. Something woke me in the middle of the night though—something odd. It was the absence of sound.

We had moved from an urban neighborhood where buses, cars, shouts and laughter, music and the occasional street argument were the background to our days and our nights. When I woke up to all this silence, I was uneasy. Had something really bad happened? Was the power off? I checked on our baby, flicked a switch on and off in the kitchen and wandered out to the front porch. All seemed well.

Then it dawned on me. It was just that quiet here, at least at this particular moment. Of course, quiet is relative. These days I hear a factory letting off steam in the middle of the night, and switching trains clank loudly about 4AM. We live near a hospital, and their helicopter can make quite a racket. Still, my neighborhood is quieter than most.

It’s even quieter than many campgrounds. Even in remote areas, the thrum of traffic noise intrudes into parks and natural areas, making it harder to be attuned only to the sound of birds, water, wind and fire.

It’s challenging to be truly silent in our world, and when I find that silence it’s hard to know what to make of it, how to adjust and move into it. You know what I do? I turn on the radio. It drives my husband crazy, but I guess it reassures me and make me feel less alone with my thoughts.

Annie Dillard, in her essay “A Field of Silence,” writes about a moment of profound silence she experienced while living on a farm:

… the silence gathered and struck me. It bashed me broadside from the heavens above .… There was only silence. It was the silence of matter caught in the act and embarrassed. Its poise and its stillness were unendurable, like the ring of the silence you hear in your skull when you’re little and notice you’re living, the ring which resumes later in life when you’re sick.

Well. Clearly silence is not for the faint-hearted. Later, when Dillard tries to describe this moment to a friend, the story tumbles out in ways that surprise even her. It was a deeply spiritual moment for Dillard—one so outside of her experience that it caused her to look at an everyday scene in a completely new way. I’m willing to bet that she’s still pondering the significance of that brief but eternal moment of silence.

May we all invite and make room for silence in our lives, to hear the ring in our skulls that reminds us we’re alive.