When Noise Ceases

"The teaching’s voice is total silence amid the ringing wind chimes."

The wind blew hard. The power went out. And I breathed a sigh of relief. A deep rest settled into me as the electricity that zings through the copper in my walls, quit. A buzz left my body as all the “smart” appliances and electronics with their red, green and blue LEDS screaming "I'm ready to go!" went dark.

Today there are fewer and fewer places on earth where you can sit, for even five minutes, without hearing the sound of a flying machine. Every day we are accosted by phones vibrating, alarms ringing, buzzers buzzing, and the proprioceptive experience of the vibrating earth under the influence of planes, cars, and building and wrecking machines. The noise is unrelenting.

But 3000 years ago, when the great contemplative traditions began to emerge, the world was much more silent. There were far fewer of us and essentially no noise-making machines. If 1000 people represented the earth's population today, 3000 years ago there would be 20 people. When people slept there was quiet. Not the absence of sound, but the absence of noise. Now, we are mostly not sleeping, awake with the noise, creating and integrating reams and reams of information, counting our missteps and suffering our misconceptions.

But silence is my companion, nonetheless. I live in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains in a modest house with an immodest view, seven miles away from the busy front range cities. I hike almost every morning in a 2700 acre mountain open space and at the apex of my hiking loop, there is silence. No electrical buzz. No ultramobile people clamoring around the earth. No tremor. No fervor.

In the absence of noise, I can hear the subtle dimensions of sound. How it rises and falls in space and time. The chickadee song begins over my left shoulder and then disappears somewhere a bit further away and ahead of me. And in between the rising and falling of bird call, an emptiness pulses with presence. An emptiness that calls me to open more, to put more of myself to work to meet it. I listen with my throat, for it too understands vibration. I make each skin cell into a membrane to amplify the sound. I hold its valved voice in my cupped cheeks. And as if I were born with a hinge at the top of my skull, I open my bones.

The magnificence of that bird call is revealed—each subtle change in pitch, tone, volume, and speed. In its magnificence, time slackens its boot slap command on my marching mind. Suddenly there are more moments per time, each micro instance coming into being and vanishing into emptiness. I feel inexplicably alive and subsumed in presence.

Through communion with the natural world, I became aware of the teaching voice of silence. But it was through my devoted meditation practice that I came to understand what I had been seeking in the high peaks of Colorado, in the open plains, and in the blossom of a marigold. There is synergy between my experiences on and off the cushion and this buoys my faith in the ancient scriptures, meditation and contemplative practice. My awareness of the natural world gave me entrance into receiving the benevolent presence that is found in meditation. I feel the eternal nature of that presence, in the ancient world, and in today's world. It will persist when I end, when you end, and even when this world ends.

While my love of the natural world has carried me through many crises, it is meditation practice that has grown my capacity to be quiet, to take a deep breath, clear the soundboard of my mind and actually listen to what is happening around me. Without all the noise of my stories. The wisdom that made the universe as we know it resounds in me. It moves me into clean and clear action. Of course, this doesn’t happen all the time, but when it does, I feel luminous and inseparable from the magnificence.

I leave you with a poem which I discovered after I wrote this piece for your contemplation from Cultivating the Empty Field by Zen Master Hongzhi:

The true form is magnificently illuminated with gleaming fire.

The teaching’s voice is total silence amid the ringing wind chimes.

The moon hangs in the old pine tree, cold in the falling night.

The chilled crane in its nest in the clouds has not yet been aroused from its dreams.