Quiet As A Feather
“Silence is not the absence of something but the presence of everything.”
Photo by Andraz Lazic on Unsplash
My island bedroom has a door that opens directly onto our deck. I sleep with the door wide open almost every night. The other evening my daughter crawled in beside me. Listen, I said to her, as we sipped our tea. A blanket of silence warmed the cold night air.
These days, as I sink deeper into retirement, I realize many of the sounds that filled my mornings as I got ready for work, are now absent. These days when I rise, I may hear a chickadee greeting the day, my cat purring beside me, or steam escaping from a boiling kettle. Hardly ever is it completely silent, yet there is a stillness in the air that calms my head and my heart.
Gordon Hempton is an acoustic geologist who has devoted his life to recording silent places. In an On Being interview with Krista Tippett, he shares that one of the sounds he enjoys most, is the silence in a Hawaiian volcano. “The measurement of decibels actually goes into the minus point, but there still is a sense of presence, of where you are.”
Hempton speaks about the experience of place with Tippett. He has a collection of over 100 silent recordings from different locations. “…You can discern a sense of tonal quality, that there is a fundamental frequency for each habitat,” he says. “My quiet folder is a step above that, where you cannot distinguish any activity — you can’t hear a bird, a cricket, you can’t hear a ripple on a lake, you can’t hear any of the wind going through the pines — but you do have a sense of space. Each habitat has a characteristic sense of space.”
I read Hempton's words and realize that I treasure stillness over silence. Stillness that can be found both out in the world and deep within. Inner stillness is not easy to achieve, not for me anyway! Eckhart Tolle says we fill our minds with content, things to worry about, things to do, problems, and thoughts, one after another. He says it is almost an addiction, and for many that is all they know. But behind all this chatter there is a vastness of inner space or stillness; we just need to look for it underneath our streams of thinking.
In his book, The Art of Stillness, Pico Iyer, notes, “Writers, of course, are obliged by our professions to spend much of our time going nowhere. Our creations come not when we’re out in the world, gathering impressions, but when we're sitting still, turning those impressions into sentences. Our job, you could say, is to turn, through stillness, a life of movement into art. Stillness is imperative for my writing, and I am at my most creative when my world is still.” I am also most creative when my world is still.
Mary Oliver exemplifies stillness in much of her writing, both poetry and essays. For Oliver, stillness is one of the doors into the temple.
A Thousand Mornings
"Today I’m flying low and I’m
not saying a word
I’m letting all the voodoos of ambition sleep.
The world goes on as it must,
the bees in the garden rumbling a little,
the fish leaping, the gnats getting eaten.
And so forth.
But I’m taking the day off.
Quiet as a feather.
I hardly move though really I’m traveling
a terrific distance.
Stillness. One of the doors
into the temple."
- Mary Oliver
Silence or stillness - which are you drawn to?
In October 2020, I wrote Sounds of Silence, a blog post written during the pandemic, when my world was very quiet. I wrote that for the most part, I find silence comforting. I love wrapping myself in silence. I need to melt into silence to not only to absorb but also to listen to my mind and body. I need silence to hear my own thoughts. It makes sense doesn’t it, that silent and listen have the same letters?
I also wrote about the silence of my childhood. When I was young, my mother would show her anger or displeasure through silence. Thich Nhat Hanh calls this strained silence, “where fear and anger filled the air and made life unbearable.”
And I wrote about mokurai, the Japanese word for silence, a combination of moku, silence, with rai, thunder, creating a sense of silence as a powerful force, a reverse thunder. For me, this describes communal silence. I feel the air charged with energy when I am in silence with others. I have experienced this walking the Camino with other pilgrims, holding space during a Clearness Committee, and attending silent retreats.
QUESTIONS:
This is a new feature I will be adding to some future blog posts. Much of my writing, including blog posts, starts with a reflective question or two. You have shared that some Ageless Possibilities blog post themes make you stop and reflect on your own life journey. So from time to time, like this week, I will offer you some reflective questions. Please feel free to share your comments below. I know other women rowing north enjoy your comments as much as I do! The following questions are adapted from Soul Matters.
What do you know now about stillness that you didn’t when you were younger?
What childhood moments of stillness have never left you?
What if the doorway into spiritual stillness is learning to look at your present life and say “This is enough? Have you walked through that doorway?
Did the pandemic help you find a “still space” in the midst of chaos?
What is your calming space?