So Much Noise, So Little Song
Greetings Neighbors and Strangers,
The news is filled with so much noise and so little song. It’s coming on eight years ago that I stopped listening—cold turkey. That was the first time the T-man came to town. The word trump comes from triumph. As a verb, it means: to climb to the top unscrupulously. It’s painful when someone mirrors back pieces of our own behavior that we’re not proud of.
It was the addictive quality of the impotent rage that finally turned my stomach, then turned off the radio. In the woods one day I heard a whisper: “There are other conversations happening within your sphere of influence. Press your ear to the places from which you draw life. Walk the dry riverbed of your unintended consequence. Find your work there.” But impotent rage is a hard habit to kick. Finding someone to blame is terribly seductive, and strangely comforting. It’s easier to curse than to heal. At least that’s what I’ve found over the years.
I shy away from giving advice, but I can wholeheartedly recommend waking before dawn in a place with no internet connection. At high summer, that might mean taking a nap later in the day. That will be in the cards for me, as the alarm went off at 2:30 this morning. Maybe you’ll have to take a sick day. Perhaps the whole nation needs to take a sick day. Wouldn’t that be something. I will volunteer to cook lunch and invite everyone to say something they are grateful for before the meal. With that many people, it would take a long time. It might actually take the rest of our lives. Children will be born into the sound of millions of human people giving thanks for the miracle of being alive. Wouldn’t that be something. I can also offer to teach everyone a song, something simple and easy to learn.
I find it easier to listen in the dark. To press these ears into a pulsing blackness rather than the riot of daytime. Before bed last evening I biked down the road to check email. While there, I slipped and scrolled the newsfeed for about ten minutes, tipped off earlier in the day to the attempted assassination. The grievance-generating potential of such a violent event seems almost unlimited. I fell asleep off-kilter. More noise than song.
Inky-black morning. Cloud cover holds back the dawn, the on-rushing-ness of the coming day. I hear the tap of rain drops on leaves. Then quiet. But there is almost always someone singing into the silence. Not screaming, but singing. Lone Cricket clicks just below the open window. Rhythmic and metallic, he draws my ears out and into the meadow. If you haven’t heard the pre-dawn pulse of a high-summer meadow, I pray that you are so blessed in your days. Today is the first morning this year. Alleluia. Words will do little to touch the magic of a million-insect serenade. A string ensemble playing through the night. As a gift to anyone who is listening for any reason.
Some time after I began abstaining from the news, I stumbled upon Gary Snyder’s book called The Practice of the Wild. The title more than intrigued me. In it, the author tells of being asked the following by a young white woman: “If we have made such good use of animals…what do they get back from us?” Snyder’s response:
An excellent question, directly on the point of etiquette and propriety, and putting it from the animals’ side. The Ainu say that the deer, salmon and bear like our music and are fascinated by our languages. So we sing to the fish or the game, speak words to them, say grace. Periodically we dance for them. A song for your supper: performance is currency in the deep world’s gift economy. The other creatures probably do find us a bit frivolous: we keep changing our outfits, and we eat too many different things. Nonhuman nature, I cannot help feeling, is well inclined toward humanity and only wishes modern people were more reciprocal, not so bloody.
Performance is currency in the deep world’s gift economy. Alleluia.
Dawn lifts the thick veil of night, and so Song Sparrow sets into his morning praise song. Hermit Thrush joins in, then the neighbor’s Rooster, and now Mourning Dove. Rain comes again to tap-tap-tap on house roof panels and hedgerow leaves. I stretch my ears to hear the cricket symphony beneath the dawn choir—the warp beneath the weft.
I have a hunch that how we raise our voices matters much more than we’d like to believe. In every moment the road forks three ways: grief, grievance and gratitude. To say, “I am in pain” weaves a different cloth than “Those people hurt me.” To say, “Even in this much pain, I can hear the world singing,” allows for the possibility of healing. To say, “I am alive today alongside millions of miraculous others” might let the pain to slip into the background for a few precious moments.
I wish you good courage over the coming week. There’s nothing easy about figuring out how to live in a time such as ours, marked by so much noise and so little song.
Thank you for your companionship.
With care, Adam
A timely and meaningful piece, Adam. I’d like to offer Grace as a fourth road fork. So that “In every moment, the road forks in four ways: grief, grievance, gratitude, and grace.”
To say, “I am in pain” weaves a different cloth than “Those people hurt me.” To say, “Even in this much pain, I can hear the world singing,” allows for the possibility of healing. — Beautiful, and you have brought me to tears.
I too stopped directly taking in the news about seven or eight years ago. I could no longer consistently dip into that rapid flow of information-turned-vitriol and remain grounded in my own work. What trickles through the voices of friends and family lands heavy and lingers long. I am often reminded of that old, old line: “The voice of your brother’s blood cries out to me from the ground.”
When my mother would lie awake, body and heart racked with pain in the year before she died, she would pray and weep. Last night I too could not sleep, and sat by an open window. I could neither pray nor weep. After a time, well after midnight, I heard the Great Horned Owl calling across our pasture, followed by the barking of a resident Red Fox. It is a gift in such times to be able to yet hear these nocturnal songs.