Silence in nature

"Many people just drive through the park...so for them it's just the visual beauty...when you take the time to enjoy it, the park becomes a part of what you are. It can shape you."

-from Preserving Silence in National Parks by Garret Keizer

The first thing I notice when entering a place of refuge in nature is always the scenery, the landscape. The initial moments of visual splendor usually lull me into a kind of quiet and yet thrilling trance. I'm too happy to notice anything else in the midst of such beauty and (human) emptiness. I take a few steps on the trail still enamored with my surroundings, so much so that the rest of the world melts into the background. And then eventually, as if my meditative surroundings are a disintegrating dream, I hear it; the distant hum of car engines or the quaking sound of a boat engine. Recently during a night spent on a small island in Voyageurs National Park, my camping neighbors across the bay thought this pristine wilderness would be the perfect place to blast country songs from their stereo. The steel guitars and twang competed full force with the sounding loons of the north. These man-made sounds tend to invade my experience in nature, leaving it slightly tarnished. Though when faced with such noise I try to remain positive. Without considering the implications of man-made sound in nature, I try to remember something Thich Nhat Hanh said...that every sound can be turned into the sound of a bell - calling us back to the present moment. We must learn to meditate in chaos, because silence is not always a given. That doesn't mean I believe we should shrug our shoulders and accept that the peripheral noise that we have all had a part in creating, is a given when entering the temple of nature.

"If we were not so single-minded
about keeping our lives moving
and for once could do nothing,
perhaps a huge silence
might interrupt this sadness
of never understanding ourselves
and of threatening ourselves with death
Perhaps the world can teach us
as when everything seems dead
but later proves to be alive"
— Pablo Neruda