Tag: silence

The Strange Valentine’s Day/Ash Wednesday Mashup

woman with long red hair and black dress sitting alone in a church with rays of light streaming through the windows.

It’s Valentine’s Day and Ash Wednesday. What an odd combination. The stores are full of candy and flowers. Facebook is loaded with messages about love and romantic celebrations. But I’m walking around with a black smudge of ashes on my forehead from this morning’s early Mass, where I played the piano with the choir.

It’s the first day of Lent, the six week-period leading up to Easter. The church was shrouded in purple. We omitted the “Gloria” and sang “praise to you” instead of “alleluia.” Father Joe preached the value of silence, of making space in our busy lives to pray, meditate, and listen to God.

Valentine hearts with sayings on them on a pink plate
Photo by Jill Wellington on Pexels.com

Amen to that. Instead of giving up chocolate or French fries, I’m giving up my video games this Lent. Not that God cares, but I waste so much time playing those games for fear of having an empty moment. My to-do list keeps growing, but when I’m too weary to work, I play game after game of solitaire and mahjong and do jigsaw puzzles online, trashing my left wrist with so much mouse action. So I pledge to eliminate the time-killers and open myself to the silence, the space, the pauses. As Father said, if we don’t have rests in music or punctuation in writing, we have a mess. Perhaps our world would be a little more peaceful if we took time to be quiet once in a while.

It’s good I didn’t give up candy for Lent because a guy came in as we were practicing for next Sunday and handed out bags of candy, courtesy of the Yachats Lion’s Club. The label called it a random act of kindness for people who do so much for others. I am grateful. Valentine’s Day is hard for those of us who don’t have a sweetheart to celebrate with, and I was hungry after all that piano-playing and singing. So yes, I ate chocolate in my car with ashes on my forehead. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, but not right this minute.

My neighbor, who does not do church, shakes her head at “Catholics and their rituals.” I try not to let it bother me. We’re all free to believe what we want to believe. I know that when I’m playing the piano at church, it feels right and good.

Scrabble letters laid out on a table with the word "silence" in the middle.
Photo by Markus Winkler on Pexels.com

We have a ritual on Fridays at our church (and many other Catholic churches) called “adoration.” I can feel you cringe, but stay with me. The host/Blessed Sacrament is displayed on the altar. We sit or kneel with nothing to do but pray, meditate, and let our minds wander where they will. I find it difficult. Sometimes at home I tell myself I’ll sit and do nothing for five minutes. After about a minute and a half, I’m up and doing something. I’m like the little kid who can’t sit still. But at church with other people, where it’s so quiet we can hear if someone sighs, there’s no choice. Quiet. Silence. Stillness.

I’m looking for more stillness in my life. When I feel the itch to click onto a game, it’s going to be hard to leave my device and do something else—or do nothing at all. But that’s my plan.

How often do you sit still and do nothing when you’re not sick or forced into it? Try it. Walk away from your screen. Soak in the quiet. I dare you.

***

Random notes: Last week I posted on Facebook that I had had a surgical procedure and was grateful it turned out well. I got so many comments and a few calls from people worried about me. It was a colonoscopy, folks. Colon cancer runs in my family, and I have these tests every five years. This is the first time they did NOT find anything in there to cut out and biopsy, so I’m happy. I did have a little something removed yesterday at the dermatologist’s office, but again, no big deal. Thank you, friends, for your concern. I’m thinking I won’t mention my health online anymore.  

I gave a reading and talk at Oceanview Senior Living in Newport, Oregon last weekend. It was the debut of Between the Bridges, the latest novel in my Beaver Creek series. The people there were great. They fed me lunch, they were an attentive audience, and they bought books. Author friends, do not overlook places where seniors hang out. They are smart, friendly, and they read. Plus, OMG, the coconut cream pie. I’m tempted to move in.

Church photo by cottonbro studio on Pexels.com

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Can you find one square inch of quiet?

I’m spoiled. The place where I live is quiet. Sitting in my back yard, I hear mostly birds and the wind. Occasionally a plane or helicopter flies over from the small airport a half mile south, and sometimes I hear a truck gearing up on Highway 101. Sometimes the ocean whispers and sometimes it roars, but overall it feels quiet. Or maybe it’s just that I don’t hear as well as I used to. As noted in earlier posts, I have a measurable hearing loss typical of people my age. But in my yard, I can almost hear the quiet.

Gordon Hempton, author of a wonderful book called One Square Inch of Silence, would disagree. He would say it’s pretty good, but it’s not truly quiet here in South Beach. If he measured the sound levels here, he’d probably come up with about 35 decibels coming from cars, waves, and miscellaneous mechanical sounds that I don’t notice. When a helicopter passes over, it would go up to about 90. Wherever we live, we become accustomed to a certain level of noise: cars, lawnmowers, TVs, appliances, dogs barking, people talking, and so much more. Some of us even become uncomfortable if it’s too quiet. We reach for our iPods or turn on the TV. I confess that sometimes I sleep with the radio on.

Gordon Hempton specializes in sounds. He makes his living mostly from making and selling recordings of birds, beaches, and train whistles. But his favorite sound is no sound at all. He prefers quiet, quiet enough to hear your own footsteps or the chorus of birds that greets the new day. But quiet is hard to find. Even places billed as quiet are filled with the noise of cars, planes, trains, and people. He’s on a mission to set aside one square inch of silence in Washington’s Olympic National Park, making it a place where people don’t speak and planes don’t fly over. As part of that mission, he drove across the country to Washington, D.C. in a VW bus, measuring sounds in cities, parks and wilderness areas. His book is the story of that journey. I found the book fascinating and enjoyed the way the science is folded into an engaging story. I also learned a great deal about sound.

Did you ever think about the fact that our hearing is designed to keep us safe, that most animals depend on their ability to hear predators coming so they can react to protect themselves. Animals won’t nest where it’s too noisy because they can’t hear, Hempton says. For us people, that might mean hearing a car coming so we don’t get run over, hearing a rattlesnake before we step on it, or hearing someone knocking on the door. We need to be able to hear a baby cry or a loved one shout for help. We need to hear each other in order to communicate. Hempton says we don’t have “ear lids” because we need to be able to hear all the time.

But it’s getting to be so noisy we can’t be sure we’ll hear anything. On his travels, Hempton visited a symphony hall, the Indianapolis speedway, and a basketball game. All were so loud it was nearly impossible to converse and the sound levels were high enough to cause damage to people’s hearing. Even in many of the restaurants he visited, it was too loud to talk. The roar of conversation, kitchen noises and Muzak added up to an audio attack. Even in places where people assured him it would be quiet, places like national parks and areas deep in the wilderness, Hempton found planes flying overhead every few minutes and power plants roaring 24/7.

All of this makes me glad to live where it is relatively quiet. Of course, there’s a price to pay. Mid-morning on my street, I’m the only human around. It gets lonely. At my desk, I hear a hum from the refrigerator, I hear my computer keys clacking, I just heard a fly bounce off the window. If I pay attention, I can hear myself breathing. But as soon as I get in my car, I turn on the radio as I ease into a world of noise, a world where quiet is becoming harder every day to find.

Find out more about Gordon Hempton’s One Square Inch of Silence campaign and watch a video at his website, onesquareinch.org.

I found a free app for my phone that measures sound. It rates the sound here in my office right now as a whisper. Is it quiet where you are? What kind of noises surround you? Do you notice them most of the time? Let’s talk about it in the comments. Quietly.