the sound of silence
Posted By Sherry on May 18, 2008
This morning, a Sunday!, I was dressed and ready for the day at 7:30. With the family dinner setup already accomplished, I had one of my rare opportunities to sit out on the back deck in the cool of a morning to read or just sit. I chose to make a little progress in Wendell Berry’s Jayber Crow for next week’s reading-group discussion. It’s my second time through, and I’m enjoying it just as much as the first time except in different ways, maybe for different reasons.
I had just settled into the comfy folding canvas chair when I began hearing an unrecognizable intermittent noise. It sounded like an oversized gas leak. Or so I imagined. For one who is not prone to worry, the possibilities that ran through my head surprised me. Since I hear only out of my right ear, my direction perception is often askew, so I couldn’t be sure where the strange sound was coming from. Except for the birds, the neighborhood created no sound at all. Then, again, that “gas leak” bellowed nearby.
Then what to my wondering eyes should appear directly above me…
Of course! Was it so long ago that I was up in one of those things, with an up-close-and-personal encounter with the sound that was such a mystery? Well, you can see I regained my senses in time to grab the camera before that “danger” went on its merry way. And with its exit the silence returned to my backyard world.
Jayber Crow might be a fictional character but even he expressed appreciation for silence in the few pages I read before resuming life in the fast lane. He described why he’d started attending church again. “At a certain point in the service the preacher would ask that we ‘observe a moment of silence.’ You could hear a little rustle as the people settled down into the deliberate cessation. And then the quiet that was almost the quiet of the empty church would come over us and unite us as we were not united even in singing, and the little sounds (maybe a bird’s song) from the world outside would come in to us, and we would completely hear it.”
The confluence of my mystery-sound experience and reading these words struck me poignantly. I could stand to make space in my days to simply sit in silence—and listen. Listening to silence might seem oxymoronic, as in noisy silence, but listening in silence, once all the distractions filter out, could allow me to “completely hear” and maybe even understand something mysterious.
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