Winter Nights

             Last night, awake in the darkest hours, I listened. The night before, rain had drummed hard. The night before that, wind had whooshed and roared. The night before that, rain had skittered and pattered at the whim of the wind. The night before that, other sounds of rain and wind, and the night before that and the night before that and on into the distance of dark weeks of rain. Last night I listened to silence. It wrapped around the sleeping world with delicious, soft calm. For the first time in many nights, my tinnitus was the loudest sound in the room.

            Psychologist James Hillman teaches us to look for the benefits of old age as we move into it. Waking up in the night, he says, allows us to know the night, which he equates, good Jungian psychologist that he is, with "the hellish reality of the realm of shades," with the ancient goddess of night, Nyx, and her "persecutory brood" – "phantoms of Fate, Death, Despair, Blame, Revenge, and Desire." We should embrace, he tells us, the opportunity to know Nyx because "character building may need the physiological changes that awaken the old into night."

            Mythologically, Hillman is certainly right, but experientially, for me, there are other reasons to embrace the opportunity that aging gives us to know the night. Knowing phantoms is not the only way to build character. When night shuts down our vision, not only by sleep but also by darkness, our ears roam more easily. Last night my ears wandered leisurely through the landscape, listening intently for sounds. Rain? A breath of breeze tossing a light shower of water from the trees? The barred owl calling from up the mountain? Nothing.

            No, that's not right. What my roving ears sensed, everywhere, was silence, which is not nothing. Like Wallace Stevens's listener in the snow, I was beholding "nothing that is not there and the nothing that is."

            Summer nights are loud with crickets. In the late evenings of early spring, the stentorian, throaty chorus of frogs heralds the darkening day. The rising dawns of spring ring with birdsong, summoning the ear, still fuzzy with sleep, to arise, come forth, listen. In spring, summer, and on into the autumn the sharp bark of a fox below the garden; the hollow hoots of two owls calling from long distances across the hill, their voices individually distinct, one higher, one lower, like female and male; the whistle of a deer or the light crunch of her step through dry madrone leaves; the heavier step of the bear ("That's not a deer!" you think, lying in bed, listening); in winter, the storms with their enormity of wind, their insistence of rain, their pounding and thrashing assault on the ear – these are the sounds of the night.

            And then, sometimes and only in winter, the sounds recede into the dark, into silence, bringing a peace of (not from) sound that only night – and snow – can bring. There is an aliveness to this silence, not a nothingness but an everythingness, the difference between white being the absorption of all color and black the absence of all color. That absence of color creates a presence of the color black, just as the absence of sound creates the presence of silence. On such nights as last night, we who awake in the night are fortunate to swaddle ourselves in the soothing presence of silence.