I’d forgotten a basic lesson: where there is life, silence always means. I spent the next few hours holding down one side of a cabaña, and later slept on the ground beneath it in the eye of a storm. Then a sudden and obliterating wind sandblasted my face. It was as if my vagus nerve were a dial, tuning me from static to a sublime frequency.Ī couple of years later, I sat on a beach in Tulum at midnight, in the strangest quiet of my life. Insects would take up their strings, their song swelling like groundwater all around me. With practice, I learned to still my mind and body long enough for the baseline symphony to return. As I picked down the forest path, an unnatural quiet fell, broken only by the occasional bird alarm. Silence signaled the onset of weather events, a stalking predator, the encroachment of loggers, or the footfalls of a teenager with punk rock looping loudly in her brain. There were brief caesuras, but it did not fall silent for long except in the case of a disturbance. The dynamics of that symphony shifted as day progressed into night.
WHEN I WAS a sixteen-year-old naturalist in training, we were instructed to sit in the forest and wait for the return of something called “the baseline symphony.” The baseline symphony was the music of a landscape at ease-the confluence of insect, bird, and animal song, underscored by wind and water.
0 kommentar(er)
