SILENCE & SYMPHONY

A deep and comforting silence surrounds my awakenings every morning. I sleep in a well-insulated studio apart from our home. Then, as dawn begins, I hear birdsong, so missed over the winter. The highest notes, ultimate staccato, resonate with the high frequencies I experience in my head most of the time. Soon I begin intentional breathing patterns, a sound not unlike light brushes on a tight drum, with subtle differences between the in breath and out breath.

Rising I don my slippers and we slowly shuffle across the wood floors, then an even greater volume of joy arrives opening the door: magpies, wrens, robins, crows, chickadees, finches, and occasionally chattering squirrels . But under all of that, an electronically steady beat, increasingly loud, as my grandson's alarm clock keeps a rhythm, audible even from the studio. He does not hear it, sleeping 5 feet away!

My first step up to the back door brings the excited jumping of our dogs who spend the night in the utility room. Their morning dance is not andante as mine is! With muscles ready for running, barking, fetching and chasing, they impatiently beg for breakfast, congenially panting, and smiling. Entering our home there is another quiet, but not silence. The refrigerator might be running, clicking now in its old age. Or the dryer, which also clicks in a 4/8 rhythm. Or the heater whooshing through the under-floor venting. National Public Radio might be droning away if my husband precedes me in the mornings, and still the alarm clock beeps, beeps, beeps.

So begins my daily symphony. While music accompanies much of my activities during the day, returning to the studio, closing the door at night, I stop to allow the deep silence to permeate and nurture my body. Silence is as much a part of any symphony as sound, without it there is only cacophony.

I carry within my auditory memory the deepest silences of my life: sitting in a kiva, where the earth's hum seemed almost audible. And meditating in a cave, a half mile deep with a ceiling thirty feet high, again seeming to perceive a mega bass hum, not even a hum, more like a presence.

I don't honor my hearing very often, but today I'm so grateful for those minute mechanisms, and my alert brian that allow me to appreciate the sounds of the day, and the silences of creation. May you hear in joy today, in gratitude and anticipation!