Presence

Silence is more than the absence of sound.

It was an idyllic autumn afternoon. I recall a canvas of shiny azure celestial ceiling, amber cliff faces and sandstone, and dusty boots. A medical student completing a family medicine rotation on the Navajo Nation, I had been invited on a weekend hike to some overlooks and canyons in the region. Somewhere in the middle of an afternoon made for landscape painters, I sat on a rock ledge, drank some water, and closed my eyes. The months hung like a jet engine’s contrail; their residue shifted with time’s winds until they were mysteriously absorbed by the depths of time’s atmosphere. It felt good to pause, to be awake without responsibility, to sit close-eyed without a desire for sleep. The earth was beneath and behind. A giant yawn of canyon and sky stretched before and around. A single bird called from some distant horizon. Then nothingness embraced me.

Surely I had experienced total silence in the past; we hardly notice what we are not ready to recognize. At this moment, however, in this particular place, it seemed I had earned the right to receive emptiness. There was no sound. There was no thought. The boundary between being and becoming blurred. I was fully awake, powerfully present, yet foundationally unmoored from standard states of awareness and consciousness. Unexpectedly and without intention, I had relaxed into a space of simple harmony. No up. No down. No then. Only now. Just this. Not even this. Just …

What – no sound? The observation retethered me to thought. Could I hear anything? Could I really hear nothing? Had I ever been anywhere in my life when I was unable to hear anything?

Some say that sensory deprivation can have unsettling effects on the psyche. This was not such an experience. It felt invigorating to know that it was possible not to hear. I could create sound, yes; I tested the theory by a slight ruffling of my shirt sleeve. But nothing else was rumbling, roaring, buzzing, or bothering me for attention. It seemed that the universe had gone mute. Or maybe it had forgotten my name. It was reassuring to imagine that I might, even momentarily, be forgotten.

Once observed, reality changes. The weightless sensation dissipated like the last gust of wind from a passing weather system. I fell back into my body, re-opening my eyes to a place that was both foreign and forever familiar. A bush shimmered beside me. The boot of another hiker reminded me of some schedule and timeline. “There you are,” a voice said. “Ready?”

We live our days like frames from a movie reel. Played at the appropriate speed, there is the impression of continuity, of seamless interconnection. Slowed down, however, experience is not as continuous as we presume. There are spaces in between our senses, crevasses in cognition, gaping gazes into the abyss of being that are as much breathtaking as it is breath offering. My experience decades ago on the brink of auditory emptiness was but a taste of the power and potential of silence, of stillness. Meditation motions us toward immutability. When we stop, sit, and cease to speak and listen, when we pause and perch on the precarious ledge of any precise moment, there is a place, a sliver of potential, for poise, for balance. For engaged and detached and ungrasping presence.

At the age of sixty-four, I find myself called by silence. Inside its welcome, there is neither regret nor joy nor desire to be better, different, or anything other than here, inside a still moment, sheltered by the tranquil happiness for the gift of being alive.