“External silence can be the doorway to inner silence.” – Ram Dass
On a recent lazy holiday morning when it was still dark at wake up time, my kids and I were snuggled in my bed watching a lightning storm out the windows. Lightning is fairly uncommon in our area so Miss O was chattering away about it in her typical 7-year-old patter until three-year-old Mr. D said, “Ssshhh, I can’t see.”
As someone who relishes and recharges from quiet, I really appreciated that sentiment.
The past few days my kids and I have been staying at an AirBnB on the Washington coast. There is no city noise here – no car doors slamming or car alarms going off, no hazy road noise, not the occasional siren and no one talking on the sidewalk. It’s just the roar of the ocean. It’s like a complete vacation for my ears from the noises I’m not aware of hearing until I get away to this entirely different soundscape.
In an On Being podcast, Gordon Hempton, an acoustic ecologist, called quiet a “think tank of the soul.” In her introduction of him, Krista Tippett mentions that he’s gone out to record dawn breaking across six continents. She goes on to say, “He defines real quiet as presence — not an absence of sound but an absence of noise.”
I was so taken by the work of Gordon Hempton that I’ve written about his work before in a post titled Silence. One of the points he made that really stuck with me is that our ears are always on. That’s why alarm clocks work – because even though our brains are sleeping, our ears never do.
Gordon Hempton told Krista Tippett how he became dedicated to being a listener:
“I grew up thinking that I was a listener. Except on my way to graduate school one time I simply pulled over — making the long drive from Seattle, Washington, to Madison, Wisconsin — pulled over in a field to get some rest. And a thunderstorm rolled over me. And while I lay there, and the thunder echoed through the valley, and I could hear the crickets, I just simply took it all in. And it’s then I realized that I had a whole wrong impression of what it meant to actually listen. I thought that listening meant focusing my attention on what was important even before I had heard it, and screening out everything that was unimportant, even before I had heard it. In other words, I had been paying a lot of attention to people, but I really hadn’t been paying a lot of attention to what is all around me. And it was on that day that I really discovered what it means to be alive as another animal in a natural place.”
Gorgon Hempton on the On Being podcast
To the wonderful perspective provided by Gordon Hempton, I would add that it’s only when I sit in silence that I can hear my inner voice. It’s wonderful break when I get away from the city noise and find outer quiet but I still have to work at cultivating my inner quiet. When I manage that, usually by sitting in meditation, even for just a few minutes (or seconds sometimes), I’m rewarded with a renewal of spirit and ability to listen to myself.
So I echo Mr. D’s sentiment in all it’s different meanings, “Ssshhh, I can’t see.”
(featured photo from Pexels)
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