A quiet August night teems with sound. Drowsy birds chirp in the twilight while a motley choir of insects let their faint buzzing overwhelm the warm air once one pays them attention. An occasional croak rises into overt awareness, rumbling its way above the rustling of squirrels and chipmunks in trees overhead. What else is out there? I know not, safely perched as I am on a porch with lights and devices to expel the most unsavory of small characters this evening.
Of course the spiders still weave their way on window sills and between chair legs as they sit idle overnight, throughout the day, even as we sit of an evening. Until after a few days when, alongside the accumulated morass of dead leaves that have fluttered onto the painted wood, they are swept away by broom and foot, so the cycle can begin again. But this interruption happens midday, perhaps late afternoon in preparation for the upcoming evening as the weather once again appears ideal, teasing the upcoming autumn with crisper air and sinking temperature.
Then it is back to the loud silence, sometimes ignored by virtue of conversation or being lost in a book, the sounds of our minds and mouths letting us remember the evening as quiet.
Does anyone truly want silence? I think not. They want the resigned comfort of being beside, but apart from, nature. Forgettable ambience. The knowledge of there being something, anything else around, unthreatening and living, is an experience we’ve been told should calm us. I wouldn’t be so pleased with my sprays and smokes were they to drive away all nature without discernment. So, I bask in my cleverness (that is, the cleverness to buy someone else’s manufactured cleverness) as much as I am washed in the soundscape of a suburban evening. The most exotic visitor is a neighborhood cat, the most common a neighbor strolling or a car revving. We greet each of the first two and tut after the latter, the loud eruption breaking the peace of our safe observation of nature. All of which we can only hear, never see, once the lights dim.
This is the natural order depending on one’s beliefs. Man’s dominion over nature, a most imperfect facsimile of our cosmic caretaker’s attention to us. It is a sacred duty for which we have neither the patience, skill, cooperation, or empathy required to succeed. Not nearly enough of us feel that pull strongly enough or long enough to rediscover the path. Yet, on a loud quiet August night, I feel the pull. Not so much as when I sit atop a rock near a stream in the hills, or stand beside a tall and lonesome tree, or gamely follow the looping path of a stumbling bumblebee from flower to flower. No, I’ve had interactions with nature that are entirely religious, that command respect and focus my welcomed obligation to the world at large.
This is not one of those moments. It’s simpler. A calm moment that expands my world just enough to notice a different perspective.