Some of us believe that silence is equivalent to peace. That’s a fallacy. True silence is elemental; it is unto itself. Sound is made and inserted as a variance to silence. Silence is the flat line of a continuum, and sound adds variance to the medium. Sound brings peaks and valleys, highs and lows, diversity of a sort. It would seem to me that true silence can only be achieved in physical death. Molecules vibrate of their own accord, and with the vibration comes sound. Life is noisy. Life has sound, and that’s the nature of it.
The planet makes a sound, even in the quiet darkness of outer space. It is a vibrational and rotational solid mass that complies with the known laws of physics. Spinning objects emit a sound, a hum, a whir, sometimes a whistle or squeal if the rotation is fast enough. The planet has a heart beat, as magma shifts beneath the crust and tectonic plates push and shove each other. Organic beings have heart beats as well, and so we understand that silencing the heart is equivalent to physical death. Once again, silence is not equivalent to peace.
Our world is noisy. The hum and clatter of machines, motors, vehicles, voices, music all vie for our attention every second of every day. For many of us, that is maddening and we look for relief, for some place that is quiet. For me, quieting the sounds of modern living is not enough. There is noise in my head, memories that demand attention, plans that require energy. Conversations yet to be spoken, conflicts yet to be resolved. The past looms constantly, begging for revision with a healthy dose of imaginative editing. That’s noisy, sometimes rhythmic, sometimes melodic, but it’s a lot of sound. When it’s too quiet, I’m anxious, apprehensive, unsure of whether I’m still here.
Anger is very noisy, often unpleasantly so. It’s been a constant for me, a drone in the background that is often reassuring despite the discomfort it evokes. It’s often unacceptable levels of discomfort for others, which I find curious. Their rejection of people who are comfortable venting anger seems to be more a measure of their desire to control the environment than some moral accountability. I reject their rejection, and resent the urging to stay quiet, internalize my feelings, hide. I refuse to remain in the shadow of my shadow; I am not afraid of myself any longer.
I had an interesting interaction with a friend recently that brought up a lot of my discomfort with the discomfort of others concerning how i handle my emotions. She invited me to lunch, and I believed it was for a purely social encounter. Unfortunately, her primary motivation for the meal was to perform what amounted to a job interview in response to my “application” for a position on the Fellowship’s Board of Trustees. Her questions were standard corporate interview questions, asking me to describe why I wanted the position and what I would bring to it. That was disappointing, but I know this woman very well, and she is locked into a very unyielding and rigid view of relationship.
The only thing about this “interview” that made me angry was her question about how I might handle disagreement, or conflict. She took advantage of our personal relationship and became judgmental, saying, “In the past, when people disagree with you, you get mad.” I responded with some platitudes about aging and changing the amount of energy I have available for conflict, and so on and so forth and so on and growth and warm fuzzy self-help cooing sounds. That seemed to satisfy her, or not. I don’t really care. But later it angered me that she would be judgmental and take advantage of subjective knowledge of past dealings with me.
I didn’t bother to bring up all the times she’s behaved badly, and abused what she beleives to be her power. I didn’t bring up examples of how her wife complained about her controlling things to an extreme. I didn’t bring up how she shuts things down while claiming an advanced knowledge of process and the “right” way to do things because she is, of course, smarter than all the rest of us. I didn’t go there, and I won’t. But this is someone who has claimed in many ways to have love for me.
So, what is love? It’s noisy, it’s messy, it’s scary. It can make you insanely happy or bring on a grief so dark you cannot see outside of it. It doesn’t exist as process in your head. It doesn’t sit quietly and wait to be recognized for a chance to speak. It is being unafraid to look into Pandora’s Box, which actually wasn’t a box but an urn. Pandora was essentially Eve in Greek mythology, and was created to punish Prometheus for stealing fire from Mount Olympus and distributing it to mortals. Pandora intentionally set loose the contents of her urn, out of curiosity and because that was her purpose, I imagine. The urn contained all the evils and ills of mortals, but it wasn’t that simple. And when everything had been unleashed, Hope remained, tucked away under the lid.
Hope. The thing with feathers that perches in the soul. A sweet thing, a poignant thing, a soft thing that allows one to cling to the promise of life when things are darkest. But there is some reframing of that image that appeals to me. This has graced my Facebook feed more than once in the past couple of days, and seems a far more realistic image of hope:
People speak of hope as if it is this delicate, ephemeral thing made of whispers and spider’s webs. It’s not. Hope has dirt on her face, blood on her knuckles, the grit of the cobblestones in her hair, and just spat out a tooth as she rise for another go.
That’s more what speaks to me of hope. I’ve never seen the soft versions of things, but more the MMA fighter with a bloody brow, eye half-shut from swelling, cut cheek but motioning the opponent to come on, bring it, take your best shot. Until the final bell sounds, bring what you’ve got because I still have the hope of the ages left in me, the hope of all those who are in me and with me. The hope that love is not a lie, that love can not be counted out. The hope that I was not wrong about who I am.
The Sound Hole 