A Quiet Morning
Thoughts on Sounds
When I have the chance, I sit in my kitchen, in the little breakfast nook beside the sink, and listen to everything outside. The other day, I heard the chipping of a California towhee outside my window amid the whir of a frantic pigeon taking flight. The sound of the highway was softened by its distance. Then quiet returned. I can’t see the sky but I know it’s cloudy, and I know that it’s as gloomy as yesterday. As the rest of this July has been in the Bay Area. The quiet breaks. A car speeds past my building, quickly leaving this corner of the street to its peace. This is the white noise of my home.
Eventually during these mornings I’ll have to leave the seat in the kitchen and move over to my desk to begin looking at emails, charts, data sets, read random yet related articles and texts, frantically returning to my calendar, calling source something, and then I’ll get out of my seat to head into work at the coffee shop or run errands, sometimes go to the beach to surf, and suddenly all the hush of the morning will have vanished into work, responsibility, the trudging of time. And with it, in the rush, the day will be done. But I’ll at least have had that quiet morning.
This practice, if I can really call it that, of lazily listening to the sounds outside, is something I’ve done, to varying degrees, since I started to enjoy the practice of writing. With a pause in thought, a blank and motionless page in front of me, I found, and still find, the joy of quiet so relieving as I start to get a hold of where it is I want to begin. It’s not explicitly a meditation, but it feels akin to it usually.
These quiet moments are necessary, even if I don’t have a free morning. At some point in the day I need to unplug, stop doing, and zone out and listen. I’ll sit down somewhere, more often than not in my car, hopefully close to water, and listen to what is going on around me: to neighbors, the calls of oystercatchers and crows, cars on streets, construction, engines revving, passing music—the world moving about with a dedicated purpose that, when listened to seems so quietly insignificant, yet unstoppable, like ants walking determinedly in their lines.
Sounds might be the most grounding part of my life. Sounds in their simplicity have a way of quickly returning me to the present. For those of us able to hear, we often take it for granted, only thinking of it when someone talks or a song is played. But sound is such a defining feature of our lives, and seems to impact so much of our moods. Sound is the texture of a city— the loud and overwhelming streets of New York do not sound like those of San Francisco or London. They are loud like a city but are not so cut and paste. And so too with wild places, the stunning quiet of dunes in Oceano is not the same as the deserts of the Inyo National Forest. The clouded mountain forests of Oregon don’t have the same birds, or tenor as the foot hills of the Sierra, though at times some could mistake the two for each other. The high alpine sierra is almost a sharper quiet than its lowland desert counterparts in the valleys below. Each place is made of the sounds of those that inhabit them, not just its topography, and to pay attention to the sounds whenever one is, regardless of knowledge, brings one into a closer understanding of a place than using just our vision.
Obviously aside from how loud something is, music, and the history of prejudice of accents and dialects (which we find plenty of bigotry within), the everyday sounds of white noise that we hear were rarely prescribed a judgement, a way in which to understand them as being good or bad, as having a value outside of just what they are. A sound, in our lives, is often just a sound, and nothing more notable than that. We can’t really put much quality to it, aside from saying something is too loud.
A crow called as I sat the other day. I know people who hate their calls, but from this distance, how it disperse into the cloudy air from many blocks over, is only an identifier to me. There is a crew here, the sound tells me. A crow call may be loud, but there are few connotations to the sound. The bird itself, for some, can have meaning and judgements, but not to the sound in and of itself. The crow, however, of course holds many meanings and connotations. Unlike our cultural view of objects as they appear, like our cultural takes on skinny jeans or baggy pants, sounds are something more easy to engage with without judgement. They exist in brief moments, vibrations passing through my auricles into my eardrums, turned into sparks of synapses and made into the experience we call sound. Sounds occur only in an instant, quickly drowned out by other noises in their wake. This is why I love a free morning when I have one. I can sit in my quiet apartment, listening to the day begin, having little more ability to get annoyed or upset as each sound enters the din of other sounds, reminding me in a simple way that other things, far beyond me, are tireless in their happening.