Seeking silence

As the frantic activity of another school year begins, I find myself envisioning the calmness of a life in the eye, rather than the fury, of the storm.  Would it be a respite or simply a deadening coda?

The question made me think of a poem written in my 14-year-old youth, my first and last poem ever published.  It's long since lost, but I remember a couple of lines:

Silence is not practiced as much as it once was
This generation has never felt its soft breath or its heart throb

It's hard to imagine the great void of nothing that is silence, the "nothing that is not there and the nothing that is," in the beautiful words of Wallace Stevens.  We don't like silence.  We don't like to experience its weight and the creeping fear of being absorbed by just our own thoughts.  We go to great lengths to avoid being left with them.

So we engineer an orchestra of white noise and electronic distractions to keep ourselves occupied--I hesitate to say entertained--to fill every nook or cranny of brain space that a stray thought can suddenly find.  We overload our senses and deaden our sensibilities.  We've become noisy walking dead.

Only after reading Thomas Merton did I realize that silence is, in fact, a real practice.  It is an absence that is, paradoxically, the presence of something profoundly disquieting, if you'll pardon my choice of words.

Even in a small town, there is the constant rattle of neighborhood noises:  the dogs that won't be quiet, the engines that won't be stilled, the lawnmowers that buzz and drone, the sirens that transport a crisis, the televisions that intrusively pacify.

In the countryside, I begin to find intimations of silence:  the great dome of the sky, the chilling cry of coyotes through a still night, the unimaginable open space that suggests you're alone.  And the knowledge that the vastness will continue, with or without you.  It takes courage to confront that silence.

Thomas Merton understood that.  His journals describe the most meaningful confrontation silence affords:  knowledge of and beyond ourselves.

Yet it is in this loneliness that the deepest activities begin.  It is here that you discover act without motion, labor that is profound repose, vision in obscurity, and, beyond all desire, a fulfillment whose limits extend to infinity.

And so, I'm left with another question as I contemplate the demands of silence.  Do I dare? And, do I dare?