Discuss: Silence Like Scouring Sand

I attended a photography of The Hoh River presentation yesterday at Peninsula College in Port Angeles, Washington, where I now live. We are a several hour drive from the Hoh.

As a blind person,I quietly grieved being unable to see the photos, then a collesgue told me about Orion and this exquisite article. Thank you.

It returned me to a favorite spot and brought all the images of silence I had heard the first time I visited the Rain Forest. After that vist, these two poems were borne:

Hoh Rain Forest
                      Silent symphony
In the key of green
Sweeps my soul
Into stillness.
                                - Dee Brauninger

and

Old Growth Forest
Tiny Douglas firs,
Lined up along a nurse log,
Wait in the forest duff
For their turn to sip the sun.

      - Dee Brauninger

I just hiked the AT, and I know there’s some silent places in New Hampshire and Maine, because I sat and made a point to “listen” to it. Same goes for northern Georgia, Tennessee, and North Carolina, in the remote parts of the National Forests there.

We even have some here in Michigan, way up north, anyways. Not that all man-made sound is bad, even in nature. We belong on this earth too. Of course I think most of us would agree it’s the ubiquity of our noise that’s the problem.

We all need places like the One Square Inch. Remember Chuang Tzu: “Only what is still can still the stillness of other things”

Silencing our noise in order to hear Nature speak is certainly an endangered experience - one that shouldn’t be so inaccessible that one has to go great distances to find it.  With this in mind each time I hike with school kids I try to find a place along the trail where we can sit and be silent for 1 minute, just to listen. It’s been profound.  Without such minutes how will kids know that it is lost?  I’ve been inspired by a dear friend, J David Bamberger, who named his ranch, Selah, to provide a place to “pause, ponder and reflect” on Mother Nature.  If we never hear her many voices how can we protect her from ourselves?

Your graphic descriptions have had a profound effect on me. I actually visually and auditorially experienced something so powerful that I am fighting for silence for oldgrowth myself in all ways I can think of. Not that I dont have the odd breakdown because of the Noise.
Might I ask insullations and contientiousness can be acomplished in some rural areas.

A Seattle native now longterm resident in France, but new “Orion” reader, I read this article in my Paris suburban house. The double-glazed terrace doors open, I hear both birds and wind in trees, and regular passing traffic. As a musician, with years of trained listening to minute acoustic variations, the deafening, interminable chaos of a city like Paris is torturous. Bravo to the “square inch” project; even the memory of the Hoh River’s rich silence is a solace! And such silence is indispensable to our hearing that deep inner voice that can be so fearsome, but speak so true. Artificial, engineered un-noise is an inadequate alternative.

As tires are the tongues of trucks
To warn me from their way
And trees give voice to wind
A howl or sigh to say
So do written words my mind possess
And spoken words my heart caress.