The Sound of Silence

When you look at this picture, what do you hear?

Nothing, right? It's just a picture! There's nothing to hear!

Except that's what I actually heard when I took this photo in that spot.

It's not usually silent on my morning walks. In the summer, there's a cacophony of birds and far more traffic on the paved road a half mile away. Any time of year, there's likely to be at least some wind whistling past my ears.

But in the winter, before the sun is even up, if there is no wind and no one happening to drive on that paved road while I'm walking, I can stop and hear the blissful sound of . . . silence.

I don't know if you've ever really heard silence before. It is certainly pretty much impossible in a man-made environment. It's not very common even in nature. The only times I've experienced true silence are in winter, often after a snowfall, when everything is muffled and the animals aren't moving around**.

But here, even when there isn't any snow, I can sometimes go out for a morning walk and stand still in perfect silence*.

Bliss. And the perfect counterbalance to a season that is, despite all the joy, a very loud one.

* What's funny is that perfect silence actually sounds a bit like faint ringing, I suppose because at such times it's actually possible to hear my own blood moving.

** Which reminds me of my favorite Christmas carol, an Austrian song called "Still, Still, Still." It's hard for me to find good versions of carols like this, because they tend to be sung by large choirs, which sounds beautiful but makes it hard to actually hear the words. Here's an a cappella version by a men's group in which you can hear the lyrics, although it's not my favorite version.