Sabbath's Silence

Somewhere we know that without silence words lose their meaning, that without listening speaking no longer heals, that without distance closeness cannot cure.

Henri Nouwen

I'm on vacation this week and as usual that means Sabbath's silence has had the time to tiptoe up and wake my inner muse.  

I'm sitting silently in our kitchen beside the baby monitor that is overseeing my child sleep as my wife sits in the living room watching Football and crunching sunflower seeds. The heating vents rumble in their overheated voices, and the fridge gurgles with a cold forcefulness as it seeks to be heard above the vents' voices. This ambient noise of home is the stillness that creates the underlying echo that is the essence of sabbatical silence.  

I love the stillness in noise. I can stumble into the most sublime silences in the midst of these tiny tumults of life. I seriously considered writing a poem as a post because the tumbling waves of noise in my family home have reached the perfect pitch that lends itself to studied silence. 

But then I reconsidered my choice of form as I remembered that prose has its own form of poetry if written properly. 

Noise can be so nuanced if one can be still long enough to listen. The noise created by talking, or singing, or just being in a house that is alive seems to distract others from finding silence, but for me that noisy world that surrounds me is the oxygen that fuels the flame of introspection. 

When noise is absent I find myself becoming restless. It is such an unnatural state of existence for someone from my background. Silence was the signal that extreme danger in the form of unfettered violence was about to be unleashed. I grew up surrounded by the comfort of noisy people, in a thin walled row house where even if miraculously all of my family were absent the neighbors could be relied upon to create noise. I was in my 20's before I experienced the pure absence of noise that others call "silence" and that experience freaked me out! 

Even today after years of living in this noiseless world of the civilized I am not normally someone who casually creates an absence of noise. So much so that my wife can become uncomfortable if I stop creating noise and she quickly seeks reassurance that we are indeed alright. 

Noise is normal and comforting for me and is often the best means for creating sweet seconds of silent solitude within my own mind and soul. 

I am on vacation and the tiny tumults of simply living aloud have built beautiful hours of restful noise. 

On Sunday I will enter again the civilized world of intentionally removing noise as a means of creating silence. It can be exhausting and stressful and while I have developed the callouses on the skin of my mind and soul to handle the unnatural absence of noise it has never been a restful experience. 

I have one more day of sabbath silence before I must relinquish the luxury of nuanced noise that leads me to such silent repasts as I've consumed this week.