To Recapture Silence

I have never been one of those people who could lay on a beach or patch of lawn and just sit in the sun.  I may have done it a little when I was a teen, but it is not a natural behaviour for me.  Even while laying about reading, I generally looked for shade.  Maybe it was just training me for now.  I do not do well in heat at all.  I do best, dressed warm, in winter.  The last couple days have been hot and that has pretty much sucked the life out of me.  

I did bake on Monday and did laundry and a few other generic household things that no one counts as work, but should, but yesterday?  Yesterday's extreme warmth and it was just too warm to knit much.  I turned everything off, radio, tv, audio book. I even turned off me. It was the silence of fans and that was enough.  

When we lived at the house, we were surrounded by forest.  The summer world was set to the tune of birds.  You heard the grouse beating their wings in their mating dance.  You heard the cranes call as they rode the air currents.  You heard the robin song in early morning and the whole host of forest creatures moving their way through the day.  You heard the wind softly whisper to the birch at the top of the hill. Farther out on the road you could hear traffic come and go and the trains rumbled, their sound filtered by the canopy of trees and the half mile distance we were from the track.  It was a quiet refuge, and I never wondered that all I ever wanted from life was to be able to just be home.  

With all the changes in my life over the last seven years, that has been the one thing I could never adapt to: being able to sit in silence.  Silence became a sort of enemy because in silence, my mind would wander.  It wouldn't stop and rest.  My brain would go round and round thinking about things that have no resolution or answers, so having background noise had become pretty important.  Lately that need is changing somewhat.  Maybe now, in the time of pandemic, a stressor of unexpected and unknown dimensions, silence will be where I will find calm and peace.  

I am going silent again today to see how it feels.  Time to see if I can reclaim the silence.