What Silence Says
On Sunday I watch the sun set. From my little balcony, I sit on the deck floor, chairs still folded behind me from a storm last week. They are slim and still and patient, like butterflies with damp wings.
I listen to the incessant chatter of the cicadas. It is oppressive like the humid, mid-August air, but I am enthralled and moved by its constancy. It is like the Cherubim’s ceaseless reverence. Oh, that I, too, would make a constant hymn toward heaven.
But there is too much noise already. I scan the trees and find cardinals. Little flocks burst out under the sun toward nightly shelter. I wonder how many birds fill the trees in darkness and where they would go if I climbed the branches.
A motorcycle tears through my street and my ribs hurt. Yes, there is too much noise. I will be a person who goes through life making as little noise as I can. I do not want to add a sound. You have to be loud to be heard around here and my throat is ill-equipped for shouting.
There is a spider so small it could be a dust mite running along its anchor lines as fast as if it were on ice. Its legs are intricate and skilled. It is absolutely silent and what it makes in the world is so intimate I am enthralled. A spider is a thing I do not want to share space with. Tonight, I welcome the company of the clockwork of creation.
The cicadas are on verse three. Crickets have taken up the high harmony. My sits-bones ache from the hard floor and I am grounded and infinite.
Carpenter bees have left a confetti of shavings like pollen. Burnt amber dust across the green leprosy of algae. A dove fills a nearby branch and waits for a break in the rattle for a solo that never arrives. My heart is a sponge to grief. The dove never sings.
Yes, I will live a life that gives space to the noise of others. There is nothing else to add, is there? I think everything beautiful in the world is quiet. What is loud does not do the breaking open, it is the silence after the slam. The space after the departure. The pause after the question.
And what better way to leave a trail, than to offer my noiseless body to the world. To say, I hear your hum, I hear it with my eyes closed. Now, watch what I do not say and witness how I place my hands, here, at the rudder. How I shift my weight when the laughter around is gratuitous. How I inhale and absorb what is dripping-over. How, when we arrive, while everyone is yelping and hollering, I am away with my knees in the sand, weeping over the perfect amethyst swatch of clam shells under my silent feet.
How tears are a prayer, and breath is amen.
