Sound - whether we hear it or not, whether we pay attention to it or not - travels in waves, waves that affect us and that we move through as well as waves we make ourselves. We grow used to this stuff crashing against us and learn to ignore it, to selectively tune into particular sounds or sensations, to retreat into sounds we control and understand. Those of us who are deaf and hearing impaired still experience the waves of sound, just differently from those of us called hearing. The world is very different when it is relatively still than the usual hubbub and busyness of the average city.
Silence is a stillness. For many of us, silence is frightening, a brokenness in the continuous waves of sound that tells us the world is as usual. Have you ever woken knowing that something is wrong because the world is too quiet, because there are not enough vibrations? In this break from the usual, we can become more alert, more mindful. We might grow restless. We might meet what worries us in the stillness.
Yet the stillness of silence is also the space, the break in the usual surf breaking against us, that opens into wonderment and awe. That wonderment and awe is just on the other side of restlessness, just past what worries us, in the space that is made in stillness for the unexpected.
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