The Sound of Silence

Simon and Garfunkel wrote “The Sound of Silence” for their debut album Wednesday Morning 3 A.M. produced in 1964. Their folk acoustic sound was not well received in the era of “going electric” like successful contemporaries Bob Dylan and the Beatles. In fact, when their record was a flop it broke up the duo. It wasn’t until their producer called them in again to add electric guitars to a new version of “The Sound of Silence” that they gained wide range recognition. Their song about silence got louder. Today, the song has been played more than 323 million times on music platforms and certainly many more. 

What always strikes me in thinking about this song is that silence is a sound, or rather an absence of sound that we are used to hearing. But in that absence, like water rushing in, we finally can hear the sounds that have always been drowned out. As humans who fill our days with noise—cooking, talking, watching, tinkering, typing, scratching, playing, organizing—these activities seem to fill our space with enough buzz to not get the quiet. Or the silence. And the irony of the song is trying to fill the silence with words and answers but that truth is found in silence.

When I am struggling with a weight of decisions, I unconsciously set aside many hours of pondering, most often taken in the form of walks, runs, hikes, or rides alone. Hiking to a secluded spot or an overlook where I can sit and think and listen in my mind is a way for me to find answers. However, recently when I did just that, I thought about the getting of an answer. Looking back, I actually never get answers when I am sitting and listening. Because when I write about that experience to process what my thoughts were drumming on, it is usually describing the silence, which turns out to not be silence at all.

Here in Utah, I can easily hike up 1,000 ft in a short period of time, granted with a lot of effort, sweat, and burning thighs, but the height is always a short distance away to start. I found myself seeking out the height and the air of a canyon situated above the valley where I live so I could sit alone and think. And talk out loud, I do that too. I spent a while looking, examining, gazing, staring all around me. Nature’s setting always seems ideal to me to sound out questions and thoughts that don’t reverberate back the same way indoors. Nature may be indifferent to me and my needs, but it is an indifference that mirrors back a patient silence to my incessant need for answers. Ecological patience is everything in its time. No wonder I find peace in that stillness and somehow instead of walking away from what I thought I needed in immediate answers, I instead gain more patience.

As I wrote this post, the ideas I seemed to be expressing pivoted on a word—mirror—that in one self-edit I changed to ‘reflects;’ I thought people would relate more to ‘reflect’ than ‘mirror’ given our standard relationship with mirrors. We see what we expect or know in a mirror image of ourselves. But when an adept editor looked it over, he shared a link to meditations by Father Richard Rohr, a Franciscan priest and acclaimed author, on the topic of Nature as a Mirror of God. And I changed it back realizing that I had in fact accurately described what I was seeking in the act of earnestly gazing at nature in my own meditations.

Father Richard Rohr writes, “Contemplation erases the separateness between the seer and the seen.” In going to places of solitude in nature, I think that while the outward desire is to stare into the stillness and then hear an answer to my question sounded back to me, a subconscious desire is better described at transferring the stillness I witness before me to my inner self—to calm the anxious inner self. 

Father Rohr cites an 11th-century Benedictine abbess and saint, Hildegard of Bingen, who wrote about this relationship between the inner self and the outer world represented by Nature, who also serves as a connection to real Creation and the divine. He writes,

“Hildegard often used the word viriditas, the greening of things from within, similar to what we now call photosynthesis. She recognized a readiness in plants to receive the sun and to transform it into energy and life. She also saw an inherent connection between the physical world and the divine Presence. This connection translates into energy that is the soul and seed of everything, an inner voice calling you to “Become who you are; become all that you are.” This is our “life wish” or what Carl Jung called the “whole-making spirit.””

My experience seeking stillness and the divergent sounds of silence in nature begins to make sense when I consider this tenet of the spiritual inner self, a core principle of Christ’s doctrine about our inherent divinity, and its ongoing change to become more aligned with the Holy Spirit, or the source of all truth. Nature is a mirror for God, as St. Hildegard writes; it mirrors the wonder of creation back to us who are also part of that wonder but in our busied minds need to reconnect to that. We need to connect the energy of the matter around us, both organic and inorganic, that embraces a clean and clear connection to the divine Presence.

I believe that the key is to still send out the questions to the void of space between me and the rocks, the trees, the mountain ridges. This is, when consecrated as such, an act of wondering in awe at the Creation. Then listening to the sounds of silence becomes a more participatory mode of allowing Nature to mirror the divine within us; our divine inner self. Creation, moving at its deliberate, thoughtful pace, teaches patience. Patience is a tenet of ecological time. Watching orbits of the sun, the changing of the seasons, the horizon with tenors and tones of light, reveals what is to come. 

As a human, I seem hard-wired to be discontent with stasis and yet uncomfortable with change. At the edge of a height that stretches air and light between mountainsides with rock and tree, listening and seeing makes me more alive because it lets me come to myself. I realize how very much alive my body and my spirit are and interconnected with everything around me. In the sounds of silence is a host of truths.