Silent Night

It's late, and quiet. Very quiet, deafeningly quiet, no... silent. I hear nothing but the hissing in my ears which I've read is the atmosphere passing through the membrane of the inner ear. This silence is not the abscense of, but a presence that feels thick and dense, omnipresent in its vastness.

Listening to silence makes one pay closer attention. Of course it does in this age when nothing - no thing - demanding your attention shocks us as a freakish and fearful anomaly. "Something must be terribly wrong - I don't hear anything!" I admit that age is taking its toll and I don't hear as well as I used to, but what's the down side of that sometimes?

Wait! The single chilling call of a coyote strikes the silent wall like a bell, and the high pitched chorus begins. The pack is passing along the fence line on the hunt. Their calls can be lengthy and complex in pitch and dialect, but tonight it's one long cry and then silence envelopes the night again.

Quiet again. Breathing into my body, exhaling into silence... and again. Meditative perfection and yet I rarely draw upon it. I take it for granted now but there was a time when I lived fifty yards from Interstate 5 and the white noise of traffic had its own rhythm and comfort. A feeling of being "in the mix", traveling with a pack of a different kind.

Distant, dull clacking from moving freight cars comes within earshot, and then the blast of the horn before it crosses the Siper Road five miles to the northeast. They fade out as they faded in and the silence returns. Always there, like the sun - even when obscured by clouds, the earth, or the Path of Totality.

It's late, time for bed.