I live in Northern Minnesota and I have the great privilege to live with silence. Now, I realize this notion sends most people over the edge of reason. In this day and age, the phone provides constant contact for those who can not tolerate being alone in silence. Silence has become something we now have to hunt and find, it has been banished and its wake makes people crazy feeling. People have more trouble being alone, now more than ever.

It seems we all could do with some silence every now and again. Just for sanity’s sake.

I spent the majority of the pandemic in Santa Monica, California. I lived in a small apartment but had a balcony with a pretty great view. Lucky lucky lucky until the construction began in earnest on the apartment building across the street. Construction is a major noise maker in most cities and the building going on in LA county is quite impressive considering they rob water to make life work. Anyway, the building goes on from 7am until 7pm and 6 days a week until the deadline approaches then 7. I was inundated with construction noise and it was a steel framed building of 5 stories, so the noise was a raging banging that reverberated and caused a lack of peace in the neighborhood, for months. We were driven to despair paying premium rents and lulled by the constant hammering rather than the tide of the ocean, I almost lost my mind.

When I got back to my house here in the northland, the level of green made my eyes bleed and the silence, I mean the utter silence of nothing but the wind moving through the trees that live in the block across the street was something I forgot existed. It was golden just like they said. I couldn’t get enough of it. I sat in silence for months. We were still surrounded by a death giving pandemic but now I had some space around me and was not under the constant attack by a virus everywhere I went. But greater than that was the perfect silence. I sat and sat day after day, in silence and still, after a year and half, I mostly live in silence.

And I wonder if I hurt myself letting that hammering of my soul go on for so long. Am I ok or am I depressed? Is my love of silence now keeping life at bay?

It seems sometimes the lack of wanting to do or move forward could be attributed by the force of that noise, the unrelentingness of sound, forcing me to keep my windows closed and noise cancelling ear buds in, all while still trying to write. And now the silence is everywhere just as the noise once was and I still can’t write. I listen for the trees and the sound of kids at school that bounces on the sound waves moving around, and sometimes I hear church bells. But my ears have learned to search for better sounds than the hammering and constant hammering. But did it move me too far from myself and my love of silence has become a love of aloneness as well? I do want to hear myself think. I am tired of being bombarded. Maybe it has changed me!

But as I deepen my walk in wisdom I think I will accept this gift of silence and even the gift of aloneness. Even as all of this can lead to depression for many people, driven insane by so much loneliness and so much silence, being depressed over this gift wouldn’t be a walk of wisdom at all. The magic is in knowing that my ears hunger for the sounds of the unseen and they can only be heard in silence.

Go take a listen…