Field Notes on Silence - The Door with No Knob

Writing, as with life, is more about listening than writing.
Indeed, “listen” and “silent” are spelled with the same letters

Early February 2024

I recently spent four days in a Thai hospital, receiving excellent care in a private room. I had total control so I closed the curtains, turned off the lights and left the damn TV off the whole time. I tell you, walking away from that little silent retreat felt like the last time I visited my sister in Montana. God, I can’t even remember when that was. People fear silence perhaps now more than since the dawn of contemplation. In any era, embracing a life of deliberate silence is not something you initially choose but are called into, indeed pulled into. Something more than my shoulder began to heal in those four days in the hospital, or should I say that I sensed something more was begging to be fixed.

When silence begins its siren call, it traps you in a cage of anxiousness and keeps you there until it feels you can handle it, an acclimation chamber of sorts. Or it rejects you and releases you back into the clamoring world of comfort zones and hamster wheels, where the rest of you copper-tops piss away your days. From time to time I’ve heard its illusive whispers over my shoulder, but now it’s much louder and more frequent. They crank up the volume of all things that smack with the dissonance of lifeless life, whose primary source is coming from electro-digital sound making gadgetry.
 
More complex than the absence of noise, this is the newest zeitgeist of narcotics, designed to drown out the austere sacredness and deliberate existence. I feel like the whole planet is hooked except for me. Someone should write a history from the angle that the entirety of technological advancement’s single goal is to smother the sound of the sacred. The din has become no less nauseating to me than second-hand smoke and my spirit pines for the solitude of my hospital room, or for the sense of place on Childs Road in Trout Creek MT. Hearing silence is an inside job, that’s true, but it’s much harder to do that job when you’re up to your boobs in audible sewage.

I’m not sure where I am just now, other than in that acclimation cage. Perhaps I’m going to be told that I’m ready, I don’t know. I feel I have nothing to say or to write without first going through that knob-less door over there to my left, a door that I’m sure isn’t even on most people’s radar. Why doesn’t it have a knob, what is behind it, and why do I even have the notion that something is? If answers exist, I sense that the next level involves much more than the mere absence of pesty noise.