Brey Willows

Card 4, Writing Down the Bones: What is silent?

Silence is hard to find in a city. On earth, maybe. I don’t think I’ve experienced true silence in a long time. There’s always a bird calling, or something moving in the underbrush. Is there ever real silence? Even glaciers crack and grumble.

I suppose the fruit in the bowl is silent. Entropy doesn’t make noise, does it? The slow sweetening of the fruit as it sits there, day after day, until it begins to rot instead…that’s a silent process.

I was about to say maybe that’s the way our bodies work too, but that’s most certainly not true. My knees sound like like crumpling paper when I go upstairs, and they crack like little icebergs when I get down on the floor. That’s the sound of aging in motion. No silence there. The sounds I make when I sneeze now are a language unto their own. Or maybe they belong to the language of the Meno Woman.

There’s quiet, though. The silence of the house at 2am, when the hum of the fridge and my wife’s slow, steady breathing are all I can hear. There’s the quiet of a forest when we walk through it, with just birds and leaves creating a simple chorus. The moment you can look at the stars spread across the sky, with only an occasional car going past. Or the way the waves splay themselves on the shore, whispering over the pebbles and constantly rearranging them to a perfect rhythm.

I love that kind of quiet. The kind of quiet that says life around me continues in its own special way, that it doesn’t have to be loud or splashy to be utterly perfect.