The Ragged Edge of Silence: Chapter Two.

In January, I posted about a book I started to read a while ago and to which I wanted to return. The Ragged Edge of Silence has sat from that time on top of the shelf in the living room. I see it and want to get back to it, but I have not. As I continue to try to focus on what are my main priorities, this becomes an unacceptable state. I know there is something in this book for me; thus I must take it up again.

Chapter two chronicles John Francis' decision to be silent more than a day, more than a week, and finally to his next birthday. He also walks 30 miles to present his art and his silence to a friend's class at Sonoma State College. One of the most interesting things in this chapter, to me, is peoples' reactions to his decision to be silent and how some of these reactions change over time. In his decision to extend his silence, Francis frames it as an experiment to feel more at ease and to make others more at ease with this change, but he also touches on how being silent did not still the conversations in his head but made them even more present while creating a sense of an altered state.

The exercise in chapter two relates to his two day walk to get to Sonoma State to present. On this walk, he was rewarded with new vistas and the feel of air on his skin. The objective is, "Discovering yourself in your body, as an extension in the environment where we live."

This is especially interesting to me right now having just returned from St. Louis which is surprisingly similar in temperature right now; both Boston and St. Louis are unseasonably warm.

In St. Louis I took many walks, I breathed in the air, reveled in the glorious redbuds, magnolias, and other signs of full-on spring. Upon my return, I was surprised by the magnolias here in their early prime. They often get short changed by frost or heat.

The birds, too, are different. I awoke each day in St. Louis to the amazing dawn chorus. This morning, there were monotone chirps at first light. It was incredible how the melodies of the St. Louis birds reached inside me and calmed my spirit.

Today in Boston, it is warm. I went outside, with a monitor set on silent to keep an eye on the sleeping Reuben, and extended my senses. The earth is warm and beckons me to work in it. I feel it as though the barrier of my skin is just an idea. The light breeze blows just right, temperature and force, that it too passes through me. This is the time of year I am most alive, most connected to the natural environment. I don't feel too connected to the trucks bumping over the raised crosswalk or the inharmonious recorder lessons going on in the school across the street. Yet on a day like this, those things are reside only on the surface and disappear easily.

Thinking more on this, though, I realize that it is just being outdoors that brings my senses on line. A few years ago, Reena and I dovetailed our work schedules, and I could walk to work and then take Rose home in a stroller several days a week. This hour-long walk happened in all seasons, and I acquired gear to keep her and me comfortable in any type of weather. It was a wondrous element of that year. I didn't just see the seasons change, I walked though them. I saw the very early signs of spring emerging from the snowy landscape amidst the gray drizzle. I saw the fleeting shapes of ice carved by running water, I saw the leaves turn and fall and crumble slowly to earth, I saw the slow rise and fall of the Earth's lungs for one cycle in ways I had not before. And when in her grasp, I felt most at peace--rain, fog, snow, sun, mud, whatever the day brought.