The Silence of Being

Tis the first of December today and it begins a time of silence. Nature has already put itself to sleep for the next few months. People seem to stay indoors more giving the impression of a neighborhood silence. The local kids don't play outdoors as much. It's cold and they've got their video games to occupy their interests.

The ancients acknowledged this time of year as a period of silence and inactivity. They created festivals to liven up the times. The length of days were approaching the shortest day of the year. Most of their events were pagan in nature and that may be one of the reasons religions celebrated the Christ's birth in December in order to counter the pagan rituals. Just thinking!

But back to the power of silence.

There are places of extreme quiet, where silence and nothing are one and you cannot tell them apart. Places where only nature speaks and her sound is deafening when no other audible intrusion is near.

One place is on a silent river. Where portions neither ripple nor descend through noisy cataracts, but carry liquid volumes in the stillness of deep flows and where it is far enough away from man’s modern concoctions that the only thing you think you hear are your own thoughts, but they aren’t.

If you’ve never been to such a place and find yourself in it, there will come wonderment, a revelation, a spiritual attunement, a surprise appreciation of the empathetic knowledge that only stillness engenders in a singular moment of time. Some people seek such a place this time of year because the general silence of hibernation begins with the dimming of the light.

I find my silent place in nature; any time of year.

The first time I found such silence was on the Green River in Utah as I rafted in a quiet eddy pool and found myself in involuntary prayer with nature whose sacristy I entered and then sustained by the choice of benevolent thought.

The second time was at night alone at the edge of a lake in the Allagash wilderness of Maine. The stars have a noticeable brilliance when civilization is far away. They also have a sound that man rarely hears for we occupy a space of things and doing in the Cosmos of life.

The third I experience often for I live nearby. It is on the Wallkill River in New York. When my Kayak drifts on the silent surface I embrace the Oneness and silence of All That Is.

I know that science has learned much from the music of the spheres in the vast cacophony of the heavens. I know that religions promote silence to reach the unreachable. I know that the frigid stillness of winter creates a cocoon where sound will not enter because of density.

What I didn’t know until I experienced it was the joy that silence gives the listener and that robust laughter needs no sound and God needs no dogma. The thoughts you think are yours, but aren’t, are God’s. He talks to all of us in the stillness and silence.