Embracing the Silence

I am sitting on a log in a forest, sweating. It is completely silent, that part of the late morning where the world holds its breath. It’s a moment where the day hasn’t decided what it wants to be yet — and you realize neither have you.

It’s hot, the hottest day of the year here in Minnesota, and I am in the middle of what I suspect will be an ongoing experiment: I am trying to embrace the silence.

The proximate cause of this test was the aftermath of some houseguests who brought with them a toddler… er, to be clear it was their toddler, not just one they found at Walmart. It’s not that the crotch goblin was bad or anything. But having so many people in my house knocked me off balance.

I don’t think I’d fully understood before what it’s like to live with a child and other adults in close proximity for more than a day. Turns out it’s exhausting, enough to make me flee to my basement bedroom a few times to regroup. So when they left, I reveled in the silence. I even turned off my air conditioner so there would be no mechanical hum.

I worked in silence, gardened in silence, drank a lovely gin and tonic laced with rhubarb syrup in silence, ate a bowl of beans, greens, and mushrooms in silence, then read with a nip of sotol in the quiet of my bedroom. It was glorious.

When I awoke the next morning, it occured to me how rare I allow silence into my world. I have some very old wiring in my brain that fears it, hates it, and can even start to panic when it lasts too long. This is not an uncommon quirk of my generation because many of us were left alone a lot as children, and it is something I have only recently recognized, and have begun to work on.

Thus me sitting in the forest on a schweddy summer day.

Soon the breeze returned, and the absolute silence ebbed into the hushed whispers of leaves and grass. A woodpecker started pounding his head into a tree. Vireos sang to each other. An unseen squirrel raged against the dying of the light over in a grove of maples. And, this being the Midwest, a mosquito orbited my left earlobe.

But I remained silent. I had things I wanted to sit with, and this seemed like an excellent place to do that sitting, free from distractions. One of those things is to embrace the silence within me, to quiet my busy mind so I can make better sense of the world.

This is what my brain whirr looks like in a forest…

I suffer from near chronic brain whirr. When I read somewhere that some humans lack an inner monologue, I almost spat out my Hamm’s: I can have a committee of fully formed entities in my head arguing this aspect of a problem or that, not even including the neurospicy me-voice that can’t resist pointing out edible plants and mushrooms.

That’s why I had to stop and sit on that log. Once my inner friend cataloged every plant and the few mushrooms I could see, he went away, satisfied. One by one I gently bid the committee adieu. Then it was just me.

I let stray thoughts pass through untouched. For some reason Merle Haggard’s “Okie from Muskogee” had to play several times in my head before it would leave. Then, after a while, it all stopped. It felt… still. Safe. Slow. Silent.

I am very glad I was off the trail a bit because I probably looked catatonic to passersby. I could feel my sweat drying, the edges of my lungs as I inhaled the oxygen-rich forest air, the breeze caressing the hair on my arms like the soft touch of a woman. I smelled not only the green breath of the trees, but also my own scent; I’d been hiking several miles by then.

Slowly, I turned toward the silence itself.

And I realized things I’d never once in my fifty-plus years had realized: Silence isn’t necessarily rejection — from others or of myself. It is not something that needs to be justified, punished or feared. Silence can be sanctuary. Even solace.

It was at that moment when I realized one reason I get jittery with too much silence because there’s another piece of me that absolutely, desperately needs to know what is going on. This trait I’ve been well aware of. It’s what must have made me an intolerable “why” child, and is most definitely what made me a successful journalist, and now a reasonably successful author.

A good friend asked me why this is. I got defensive. It’s one of my strongest virtues, I said. And without missing a beat, that friend replied: Is it? Or is it one of your strongest survival mechanisms? Two things can be true at once.

Two fritillary butterflies, as orange as a prairie sunset, circled each other by my right arm. One landed on the back of my hand, then they both flew off. I don’t know where. And maybe it’s OK that I don’t know. Silence is teaching me that.