What The Sound of Melting Snow Can Teach Us About Listening

Silence opens us up to a world we don’t hear in our daily lives. That’s why it is so precious.

Hi,

How are you this week? What melody does your heart hum these days?

Lomnický Peak (1890–1900) by Ladislav Mednyánszky (Hungarian, 1852 – 1919)

Gordon Hempton, an acoustic ecologist, was amazed by the sound of melting snow. He has circled the globe three times in search of the rarest sounds of nature.

Hempton’s fascination lies in the often-overlooked auditory experiences, like the gentle murmurs of underground minerals and the melodies created by discarded spruce branches on shorelines, which he lovingly refers to as “nature’s grandest violins.” He has meticulously captured over 700 of these sounds.

Through his work, Gordon came to appreciate the role of silence in our lives:

“Silence opens us up to a world we don’t hear in our daily lives. That’s why it is so precious.”

He believes that exposure to silence is beneficial for health and that everyone has a right to silence. However, over the past 40 years, Hempton has noticed a decrease in periods of silence due to noise pollution from machines, engines, jet engines, aeroplanes, trains, and increased maritime traffic.

Gordon says that silence on Earth is in peril. But it is not only the external world that is threatened by the extinction of silence. Each one of us has probably noticed the perishing of silence in the landscapes of our own minds as well.

The Right to Silence

I went to sit by a lake this week, carefully planted my feet in the grass, and let my nose breathe the fresh air brushed up my way from above the calm waters.

It’s been a difficult couple of weeks, and both my mind and heart were longing to be cradled in a loving embrace. Sitting there, I felt held by the loving world.

I noticed that, when surrounded by nature, my mind switches to a completely different mode of thought. It’s as if it recognises a glimpse of itself in the nearby tree, rock, and cotton-soft clouds gently stroking the palette of the world. This familiarity breeds peace. In this setting, I often tend to notice smaller details, both about myself and the world; I dare to be simpler and humbler, and my worries are put into a new perspective.

Sometimes, it takes a while to empty my mind. Still, invariably, the process of re-attuning eventually spreads across the stormy landscapes of my mind, and soon enough, I can delight in the sweet scent of the passing rain and the near promise of the touch of the sun. With my feet planted firmly in the grass, and the air borrowed from the calm lake, I get to reclaim my right to silence.

There might be times in our lives when this kind of peaceful silence feels unreachable, distant, and foreign. We tend to “take time as a calendar product instead of seeing it as the parent or mother of presence,” as John O’Donohue once said. And in that, we keep losing ourselves. We don’t make room for silence because we think we don’t have the time. Always striving to progress and improve something, but rarely putting in the effort to be, we drown out our beautiful melody in the ocean of noise, denying ourselves our inherent right. Because silence, as Gordon Hempton explains, doesn’t necessarily mean the cessation of sound — the kind of silence he cherishes, and which perhaps can feel more approachable to us too, can be seen simply as the space to hear and appreciate the gentle music of nature, or as one could say — of our very existence. In his own words:

“Silence is not the absence of sounds; it is their presence. It is the absence of noise pollution which I define as the presence of relatively loud but low-value sound information, such as car noise. This kind of information hinders or prevents access to gentle, sometimes subtle, high-value communication, like the chirping of crickets.”

To hear the melody underneath the noise — this is our right.

What Carries Enough Importance to Disrupt the Silence?

Hempton recalls his teacher John Muir, a man of the forest. The way he describes the uniqueness of his experience as an observer and explorer is something that often keeps revisiting me. Muir “experienced the Earth during a time when **it was more musical.”

It’s a beautiful way to see the Earth. How many of us can remember its music? But also, how many of us remember what it felt like when we, ourselves, were more musical? Because our music, and the music of the Earth, are in tune. When the latter is silenced, or rather, drowned out, our own hearts cannot sing as freely and joyfully as they were always meant to do.

There’s so much going on unnoticed when we are busy with our everyday worries, plans, and hopes, that we forget to stop and listen. And that listening can be directed outside or inside. But I believe it can be both ways at the same time, and then it is perfect listening: when we’re willing to openly experience the world around us, while remaining gently attuned to that homed within our skin.

Yet, to do it, we need to know what it feels like when we’re musical in the first place. In other words, we must be able to discern the gentle hum of our peaceful minds from the prevalent noise pollution. The “relatively loud but low-value sound information” is nothing else, but our own thoughts.

In the noise of thoughts and external stimuli, it is hard to be the person you want to be. “About sixty thousand different thoughts are said to go through a person’s mind over the course of a day,” writes Fumio Sasaki in his book Goodbye Things. “Ninety-five per cent of that is made up of the same things we’d been thinking about the day before, and 80 per cent of those thoughts are believed to be negative.”

If we don’t make room for silence, we will begin mistaking our thoughts for who we are. When thoughts get mixed with emotions, they create beliefs, and on the ground of those beliefs, we form our sense of identity. We get lost in the stories of the past and the future, forgetting who we are and why we are here. We also forget to stop, look — and listen. You are what you eat still stands true when we speak of the food for thought. Just as intermittent fasting is beneficial for our physical health and gut, intermittent thinking bears great value for our spiritual and mental well-being. As Gordon pointed out, “exposure to silence is beneficial for health.”

We must reclaim our right to silence. Only then can we truly pay attention to what is happening within us, and relate it skilfully to that in the outside world. Otherwise, we might spend our lives taking our thoughts for all there is, and we’d miss the wealth of our potential humming gently underneath them.

In our longing for melody, we might ask ourselves, “What thoughts carry enough importance to disrupt the precious silence?”

A Blessing for Presence

Silence is, indeed, in peril. But perhaps it is not entirely lost yet. To find something, we often must go to where it resides. As for silence, it awaits us at the intersection of the melodies of the world. When we put effort into opening up to the pulsating melody permeating all life creation, which is to say, when we are present with what is happening in and outside of ourselves, the instrument of our being tunes to it. And that familiarity breeds peace.

To keep this silence close, we must replant ourselves in it. Just as we can ground to the Earth through placing our bare feet on its moist skin, we can also do so through our breath. Grounding our attention to the rhythmical movements of our chests or bellies, we attune to the pulsating melody of nature — the song of the Earth holding us all together in every moment. This is something we all share with each other and all living beings: the gentle air, flowing in and out of our soft bodies, powering our muscles and hearts.

Whether we are a tiny ant, a magnificent pine tree, a firm stone, a soft cloud, a shiny duck, a wise cow, a little chubby dog, or a beautiful human — we all hum the same melody carried by the air flowing through our lungs, moving our branches, stroking our feathers.

The preciousness of silence lies in, as Gordon Hempton encouraged, its potential to open us up to a world we don’t hear in our daily lives.

Just like for him silence revealed the world of intimate sounds of nature, such as that of the melting snow, the minerals beneath our feet, or the branches on shorelines, we too can discover new worlds within ourselves, if we reach out for silence.

This is our right. Let’s claim it.

May you awaken to the mystery of being here 
And enter the quiet immensity of your own presence. 
May you have joy and peace in the temple of your senses. 
May you receive great encouragement when new frontiers beckon. 
May you respond to the call of your gift 
And find the courage to follow its path. 
May the flame of anger free you from falsity. 
May warmth of heart keep your presence aflame and anxiety never linger about you. 
May your outer dignity mirror an inner dignity of soul. 
May you take time to celebrate the quiet miracles that seek no attention. 
May you be consoled in the secret symmetry of your soul. 
May you experience each day as a sacred gift, 
Woven around the heart of wonder.

— “A Blessing For Presence”, John O’Donohue, (1998). Eternal Echoes. Exploring our hunger to belong. London, Bantam, Books. p.139

Su sniffing flowers on our walk. She’s been blessed with presence.

Question to you, dear reader:

What does your melody sound like?

With much love,

Justyna