Abby Quillen

Freelance Content Marketing Writer and Editor

Natural silence

Learning to Listen Again

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The Christian Science Monitor published my essay “Learning to Listen Again” in their January 31 issue. (It was inspired by a post I wrote here last June.)

My world has gotten a lot louder lately. My 2-year-old son, Ezra, just discovered noise.

“Airplane, airplane, airplane.” He gestures toward the sky until I repeat, “Airplane.”

“Car!” He interrupts the story I’m reading and spins toward the window as a Volvo station wagon rolls by. “Phone, phone, phone,” he says as we walk through the grocery store and hear cellphones chirping.

Usually I’m blocking out these sounds. I suppose it’s a survival mechanism that helps me live in a world full of obnoxious, cacophonous noises, because now that Ezra’s pointing them out to me, I’m longing for silence.

I’m not the only one. Gordon Hempton, an acoustic ecologist, travels the world recording natural soundscapes, and he’s been spreading some alarming news: Natural silence is going extinct.

“In the last 30 years, I’ve found it nearly impossible in the United States to experience 15 minutes or longer where there’s not some kind of noise disruption in the background,” Mr. Hempton explained in a recent radio interview.

A couple weeks after Ezra starts identifying sounds, my sister announces she’s coming for a visit and wants to go for a hike. “As long as it’s somewhere quiet,” I reply.

We choose McDowell Creek Falls, which is an hour from my house in Eugene, Ore. We turn off I-5 and head down a country road. The farmhouses thin; the road narrows; Douglas firs, Western hemlocks, and moss-covered big leaf maples crowd in. A stream babbles on our right. I can almost taste the silence.

When Hempton talks about natural silence, he’s not talking about the absence of all sound, just of man-made sound. Natural silence can be surprisingly loud, as anyone who’s been to the Oregon coast, visited a rain forest, or heard an elk bugling on a crisp fall morning can attest.

My sister parks the car and I strap my son onto my back. Then we cross a bridge and wind up a hill. My sister stops to snap photos of salmon berries and snails, and I close my eyes. I can hear a waterfall, birds, and an animal scampering through the undergrowth.

“Big truck!” Ezra squeals, as a logging truck rumbles down a nearby road.

Back in Eugene I surf through real estate websites from the tiny Colorado mountain town where I grew up. When I moved to the city for college, I told someone where I was from, and she re­plied, “Oh yes, I go there to listen to the silence.” When I temporarily moved back a few years later, I appreciated what she meant. The evenings were notably quiet in my neighborhood. Most of the houses were dark by 9, few cars passed, and it was more than a mile to the closest highway, which wasn’t exactly teeming with traffic most nights.

I start planning a visit with just one thing on the itinerary: sitting outside in the evenings and staring at the stars – just me and the crickets, hoot owls, and the occasional barking dog. I call my parents to announce we’re coming and to lament that I’m thinking of wearing earplugs from now on.

“I thought you left because it was quiet,” my mom says.

“What are you talking about?” I flash back to the last summer I spent in my hometown before leaving for my freshman year at the University of Denver. I longed to crowd onto the trolley and ride up the Sixteenth Street Mall, weave through packed city sidewalks, and shout along to rock concerts at Red Rocks.

“Remember, you used to complain about how dull it is here, how everyone goes to bed at 9, how…” I interrupt my mom, almost letting it slip that sometimes I go to bed at 9 now. Instead, I change the subject and wander around the house closing windows; outside, a diesel truck is idling and a weed wacker is hacking and whining.

Gordon Hempton teaches wilderness listening at Olympic National Park, and he writes that some students have a difficult time hearing silence for the first time and that many sounds aren’t audible until people have been out on the trail for two or three days. He writes about an elderly woman who took one of his classes. She thought she was losing her hearing and hoping to amplify what little she had left. But in the class, she realized that the problem wasn’t that she’d lost her hearing. What she’d lost was her ability to listen. I think Ezra is teaching me the same thing.

“Leaves,” he says as we walk through our neighborhood. He points up. Far above our heads, the birch leaves are dancing in the breeze, and their gentle rattle drowns out the sound of a passing car. I turn my face up and remember to listen.

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Learning to Listen

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“The first step in the acquisition of wisdom is silence, the second listening.” – Solomon Ibn Gabriol

Photo credit: NJ..

Recently I wrote a post about acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton’s search for natural silence, and something he said to a New York Times reporter caught my attention:

“When you become a better listener to nature, you become a better listener to your community, your children, the people you work with.”

We’ve become so good at blocking out the jarring sounds of our modern world – the sirens, jets, garbage trucks, lawn mowers, leaf blowers, honking horns, barking dogs, and blaring televisions – are we also ignoring each other?

Margaret Wheatley thinks so. She’s a writer, teacher and consultant, who travels the world advising organizations going through times of change and stress. She’s worked with the U.S. Army, Fortune 100 corporations, the Girl Scouts and numerous foundations, public schools, government agencies, colleges, churches, professional associations and monasteries. Several years ago she visited an organization I worked for, which seems to be in a constant state of tumult.

Wheatley says that our natural state is to be together, but we keep moving away from each other. And she thinks the reason for that is that we’re all trying to tell our own stories, but nobody is listening. In her book, Finding Our Way, she writes:

This is an increasingly noisy era — people shout at each other in print, at work, on TV. I believe the volume is directly related to our need to be listened to. In public places, in the media, we reward the loudest and most outrageous. People are literally clamoring for attention, and they’ll do whatever it takes to be noticed. Things will only get louder until we figure out how to sit down and listen.

Gordon Hempton says we can learn to listen by spending time in natural places and listening to silence. Wheatley says we should practice by approaching someone we don’t know, don’t like, or whose way of living is a mystery to us, and sit quietly and listen to what they have to say.

Could you keep yourself from arguing, or defending, or saying anything for awhile? Could you encourage the person to just keep telling you his or her version of things, that one side of the story? … I know now that neither I nor the world changes from my well-reasoned passionately presented arguments. Things change when I’ve created even just a slight movement toward wholeness, when I move closer to another through my patient, willing listening.

In 1971 activist John Francis saw two oil liners collide beneath the Golden Gate Bridge and decided to stop riding in and driving motorized vehicles. In the weeks afterward, he announced his decision to his friends and family and found himself in countless arguments. He soon got tired of fighting and decided to spend a day just being silent and listening. In his TED speech he explains:

So on this first day, I actually listened. And it was very sad to me, because I realized that for those many years, I had not been learning. I was 27. I thought I knew everything. I didn’t. And so I decided I better do this for another day, then another day … Well, that lasted 17 years.

While Francis was listening, he walked across the United States, got a PhD in environmental studies, and even taught university-level classes.

Lately I’ve noticed the healing power of listening in my own life. The other night my son resisted going to sleep. He lay tossing and turning, restless. We sang songs. We told stories.

“Are you scared of something?” I finally asked.

“Trash truck outside,” he said.

Our garbage had been picked up earlier, and we’d watched from the window as the truck’s mechanical arm lowered and snatched our garbage pails. “You’re scared of the trash truck,” I repeated.

“Yeah,” he said, and within minutes he was asleep. It made me reflect on all the times I was grieving or anxious or couldn’t sleep, and I told my husband about it, and he heard me, and that was enough.

Some believe just listening might even be enough to help heal some of the world’s most violent and entrenched stalemates. Participants of the Compassionate Listening Project travel to the Middle East to listen to Israeli and Palestinian people’s stories. Leah Green wrote about it for YES! Magazine in 2001:

After years of listening, it has become so clear to me: all are suffering, all are wounded, all want to live with security, justice and peace. All are worthy of our compassion.The question remains, how do we break the cycles of violence? Perhaps listening is one of the keys. I’m now holding the vision of a new, global listening movement.

What do you think? Have you experienced the healing power of listening? Do we need a global listening movement?