It is only when we silent the blaring sounds of our daily existence that we can finally hear the whispers of truth that life reveals to us, as it stands knocking on the doorsteps of our hearts.
~K.T. Jong
I recently rode my bicycle across the deserts of the west. I’m blogging about that trip here. Here’s an excerpt from one of the postings, from a day when I was beginning to get deep into the desert:
I pull over to have a little snack, and become aware of just how quiet it is around me. The wind is puffing around here and there, and I have no doubt that it’s going to grow into a big wind before long, but right now it’s pretty light. However, even this light wind should make some noise, right?
The quiet is mesmerizing. I realize that when the wind blows, it’s not the air moving we hear, it’s the sound of the air moving through things like leaves and trees and grass that we hear. Out here in this desert, there’s just not much in the way of leaves and trees and grass. There’s nothing whatever in the way of leaves and trees and grass in fact. There are Joshua Trees now and again, which are actually a cactus, and there are some other cactusy-looking plants along the sandy floor of the desert, but there’s just not enough volume of “stuff†to blow around in the wind to create the background white noise of the normal outdoor’s that my experience has taught me to expect.
I find I really like this. It’s a rare sense of focusing quiet. Every few minutes a car or truck passes and disturbs the silence, but I stand here a long time leaning against my bike, and appreciating the quiet solitude. It reminds me of an experience scuba diving once. I was doing a night dive. Moving along the top of a reef, I found a nice sandy area, and settled down to suspend just above the bottom, turning out my light. The darkness enveloped me completely, and the silence and darkness was breathtaking. I lay there for a few minutes, enjoying the exhilaration of this silent primordial darkness, before turning my light back on and moving my way down the reef.
On the reef, both before my little experiment with primordial darkness and after, I saw a couple small sharks out hunting. I’m sure this potential danger added something to the exhilaration of the experience. I was alone in an environment that could rapidly turn mortally hostile, and I temporarily shut down my important sense – my sense of sight. I surrendered to the environment around me, allowing myself to soak inside the vastness.
Here on the bright and flat surface of the desert, I’m remembering and recognizing that feeling. Again I’ve dropped myself into an environment that could get mortally hostile rather rapidly. The quiet around me reminds me of that quiet I felt on the reef all those years ago.
I’m not sure what it is that attracts me to these “moments†out on the edge of comfort. It’s not as though I just find myself here – I went to great lengths to put myself in this situation. The aloneness with the quiet unlocks windows in my heart and soul I think. Taking this path that leads me out along the edge of life lets me feel the edge of something greater than myself, and that must be what pulls me toward these situations. I can’t keep the smile off my face as I bask in the warm, quiet solitude.
