I just started reading The Songs of Trees by David George Haskell and was struck by the way he describes the different sounds the rain makes as it hits different shaped leaves in the Amazon rain forest. I have never been to the rain forest, except in south east Alaska, so have no frame of reference to the noises he portraits, but it is fascinating that he would have noticed this subtle difference in sounds that various leaves can produce.
Listening to the sounds of an Adirondack January makes me think of stillness. When it is very cold you can hear the wooden framed buildings pop and crack under the strain. When there is a thaw you can hear the wind through the white pines. That is a comforting sound. And when there is a lot of snow, everything is muffled, there is a buffer between your ears and the world. Although, if you’re in the ‘right’ place, you can hear the snowmobiles roaring though the countryside at break neck speeds.
Stillness is not necessarily the absence of noise. After a crazy commercial Christmas, December’s gift to make us frantic and wild with wanting and giving and getting it is difficult to imagine being still enough to hear the rain or a gentle breeze. In late November, we put up lights against the darkness, to make sure that we have enough, we don’t want to loose a second of light, so we fight the absence of light with our own weak little lights. Even though some of the lights around the neighborhood light up the snow like the luster of midday. All this doing and buying and hurrying in order to get everything done by December 25th.
So in January we hunger for stillness and maybe make friends with the dark. A friend was telling me about her drive to work one cold January morning. The temperature had not risen above zero for a week before, so at seven a.m. and twenty below it was very, very cold. Nothing moved, everything was still, waiting for some light, even the weak light of January, to bring some warmth into the frigid air. She describes the morning as driving in a dream, no sound, no movement, except her car traveling on the stone cold highway. Suddenly, out of the corner of her eye she caught a movement. Was it a bird that dared to fly out this early? Turning her head she saw a tree slowly falling over into the path of her car. She quickly swerved and it missed her car. But the sight of that silent falling stayed with her so that she could vividly describe the scene years later.
What do we do when there is no movement, when there is only stillness and quiet? What does it teach us, or is there no sound or movement because we aren’t attuned to the infinitesimal motion around us?
Father Thomas Keating said In the Human Condition: “In everything that exists, God is present…The problem is that we only access that presence to the degree that our interior life is attuned to it.” He explains that listening to the sacred text with our whole being, in a contemplative way is a means of discerning God’s presence. So like Haskell sitting on some scientific contraption on the tops of the trees in the rainforest, listening to the sacred scripture, nature, he was hearing the different sounds of the rain on the leaves. Attuned to all that was going on around him. Attuned, present, alive to the God-ness that surrounded him.
Keating said: “The external word of God is designed to awaken the presence of the word of God in us. When that happens, we become, in certain senes, the word of God.” (27)
Here is a wonderful poem about listening that Star collected.
Waiting in Line
When you listen you reach
into dark corners and
pull out your wonders.
When you listen your
ideas come in and out
like they were waiting in line.
You ears don't always listen.
It can be your brain, your
fingers, your toes.
You can listen anywhere.
Your mind might not want to go.
If you can listen you can find
answers to questions you didn't know.
If you have listened, truly
listened, you don't find your
self alone.
Nick Penna, fifth grade