Sounds of Silence

Today I woke up with a headache and things got worse in next two hours, so I decided to go back to bed. Lying there with a fever-like dizziness, I started to get extremely sensitive to sounds around me and everything was so irritating; the distant sound of cars, the sound of refrigerator switching on somewhere far bellow, the sound of the roof getting warmer from the sun rays and expelling some sort of cracking sounds… It was driving me crazy, but somehow I managed to relax and fall asleep for another couple of hours.

Sitting later with a cup of tea in the kitchen, feeling much better, I grabbed the new issue of the Ode magazine, the magazine for intelligent optimists (the level of my intelligence is still OK, but my optimism is definitely going downhill), and realized that it was a special issue, The Silence Issue. Reading articles about the noise pollution and the importance and the meaning of silence in our lives, it dawned on me just how much I have been suffering from the lack of silence in my life.

I guess this is why I go to Zen seshins and actually enjoy them from the first until the last second (who cares about hurting knees, just give me some silence and I will not complain…). This is why I almost don’t even listen to music in my car anymore. This is why I tend to run away from people, sit in my room alone… I need silence. It is like air and water and food for me. When I do not get enough of it, I start biting.

There is less and less of silence in our lives. Shopping music everywhere, traffic noise, TV-s turned on 24/7, everybody walking around either talking over the cell phone or with their ears stuffed with i-pod music. Couple of weeks back me and Marjeta stopped in a tiny little Albanian town, sat on a bench and enjoyed the local scene, with people outside on the stools and benches, talking to each other. And I felt something was really weird, but couldn’t tell what it was, until I realized after about ten minutes that there was no background noise at all. No cars, no music, no nothing. NOTHING! Just voices of people speaking. In the middle of a town. It was a bit spooky, but it was great too. Being in a place where just interacting was perfectly good enough, no need to stuff in more noise. It was beautiful, so pristine and primal.

So, yes, I guess I need to seriously consider this need of mine for silence, and start planning how to bring more of it back into my life.

About five years ago I attended a seminar about awareness of the body and of the moves of the body and within the body. The seminar was held by a French ex-ballet dancer, deep among the sand dunes of Moroccan Sahara. We were sleeping in improvised nomad tents and haven’t seen, for about 10 days, nothing but the dunes around us, stretching out to the horizon. I don’t know if you have an experience of what the sand dunes do to the sound and human perception of the sound, but just having been surrounded with this sound of silence for days after days, with only being able to see endless dunes and nothing less, had a tremendous impact on my perception of my existence in this time and space. At least for a whole week it was so damn clearly obvious that this life was not what it seems to be. And I completely understood an old Tuareg proverb:

God created lands full of water so people can live in

and God created the desert so people can find their souls