Nature is full of silence. It is present in the morning dawn, in the rhythms of the seasons, in the falling rain, in serene blue sky dotted with gently rolling white clouds, in the spring growth which seems to silently appear overnight . The falling leaves of autumn which remind us that everything is passing away.

Primordial nature, that is, the world before the appearance of man was a world of deep silence. We encounter this silence when we enter a wilderness area of our country. The silence in the woods is so pervasive as the air we breathe. Rocks are here and there as solidified silence. "It is a blessed silence because it gives us the intuitive feeling of the great silence that was before the word and out of which everything arose. ...Silence was there first before things. It is as though the forest grows up slowly after it: the branches of the trees are like dark lines that have followed the movements of silence; the leaves thickly cover the branches as if the silence wanted to conceal itself." (Max Picard, The World of Silence, pp. 136-37) There are animals here but for the most part they keep out of sight. Animals we meet do not speak and remind us of that primordial silence which gave them being. Yes, here and there a bird sings, crows crow, geese occasionally fly overhead with their trumpet like sounds but these are mere ripples on the surface of silence.

The arctic is the most silent of worlds. Here there is no singing bird, no sound of wind passing through the trees, no running water and no stone to trip over. There is nothing to distract the soul but the whiteness of the snow and the cold which invites the body to cling ever closer inside. Yet even in this world there is life which has accustomed itself to live in this great expanse of silence.

"With no bird singing,
the mountain is yet more still."

 

This primordial silence was broken by the appearance of man who carved noisy palaces out of the silent world of nature like New York city. The noise of machines has replaced the silent beast of burden. Here there is a constant din of words and movement; the noise of cars, trucks and emergency sirens. Man has become an incessant talker by the constant use of the cell-phone because he finds silence oppressive. He has not learned to listen to silence. In this atmosphere man "lives in the midst of others, sharing nothing with them but the common noise and the general distraction, [this] isolates a man in the worst way, separates him from reality in way that is almost painless." (Thomas Merton, New Seeds of contemplation, A New Directions Pub., Corp., NY, 1961, p. 55)

 

3. Listening to the Snow