A Gathering Quiet
I live in Boulder, Colorado, an increasingly hip, sporty, neo-tech town nestled at the base of the Rocky Mountains. I look out the window; it’s rainy. The mountains of the continental divide are engulfed in gray. Wisps of white cloud slide down the foothills.
All at once we realize that traffic has almost disappeared. Street noise has stopped. We are in the flight path to the airport, and now there are very few planes. The world is quiet.
There is less manufactured distraction. We watch three news channels each for about three minutes. Mainly, we want to know what makes up the public consensus about what the news is. Events of the recent past — Syria, impeachment, Putin, Brexit, China, all are gone. There is little news about the rest of the world. A friend living on a small island off Norway says that for the first time in many years, Russian warships are close offshore. Whatever is going on beyond the confines of where we live has become detached, uncertain.
Commentators speak of markets as if they had feelings, moods, doubts, investors as if they were people rather than algorithms.
The “Age of More” is shutting down. We sense something emerging. It is not part of TV chat, political lying and tub-thumping, or even the experts’ doom-laden and happier prophecies. We feel now slightly unmoored amidst hidden currents. We have no choice but to wait as quietly as we can. Something is unfolding within the silence that is just beginning to engulf us.
Now in the foothills, subtle vibrations in the ground diminish. The absences are noticeable; the earth altogether is somehow more still. A passing car or truck is an event. In the silence, a single airplane is distinct. Each is now in the foreground of ambient silence.
The mountains, pine forests, red sandstone outcroppings, the shadowed valleys are clearer. In the night sky, still obscured by the city’s light, the Pleiades, Orion, the Big Dipper are now faintly visible.
Everywhere, it is an underlying stillness that is most present. The awareness of silence has come to underly the movements in the world around us.
It is said in the Buddhist tradition that there is the aspect of mind that moves and the aspect of mind that does not move. This distinction is not absolute but made to enable us to understand mind as a whole. In our society of late, we have cultivated what moves, cause, effect, characteristics, etc., but now, when so many activities have been curtailed to tame the virus, the unmoving, like something waiting in the shadows, has become more evident.
Now, of course, the space we occupy is, of necessity, less focused on coherent goals and routine pass-times; it is more obviously centerless. Devoid of certainty, purpose, controls or set outcome.
Silence is now, for the moment anyhow, pervasive. It is a presence itself. It can’t be tamed or formatted. The unmoving is within us, ungraspable, expanding, separating the conventions we have held. Looking out the window in the evening, the mountains are shifting slowly in the waning light.
In his Sutra of Mountain and Water, Dōgen Zenji says about the sound of mountains: “Mountains outstride past and present.” *
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* Dōgen Zenji, Sutra of Mountain and Water, section 20. Kidder Smith translation.
Douglas Penick’s work appeared in Tricycle, Descant, New England Review, Parabola, Chicago Quarterly, Publishers Weekly, Agni, Kyoto Journal, Berfrois, 3AM, The Utne Reader, and Consequences, among others. He has written texts for operas (Munich Biennale, Santa Fe Opera), and, on a grant from the Witter Bynner Foundation, three separate episodes from the Gesar of Ling epic. His novel, Following The North Star was published by Publerati. Wakefield Press published his and Charles Ré’s translation of Pascal Quignard’s A Terrace In Rome. His book of essays, The Age of Waiting, which engages the atmospheres of ecological collapse, will be published in 2020 by Arrowsmith Press.