Quiet places in our lives

     Last week I wrote about preferring the beauty and ritual of fire-building to heating my house with the newly installed heat pump. I spoke from the point of view of ambient silence.

    I do think silence is important, and bigger fish than I are looking to ease the noises in our cities, where decibel levels are far above the recommended limit. But noise pollution—the loud stuff—is only part of the problem. I don't think we are even aware of the difference it would make not to have the constant hum of motors in our lives, however soft they are, however much in the background . 

    George Foy, a journalist and professor at New York University, went on a years' long search for any place on earth free of human-caused noise. He found no such place. Air traffic was the main problem. Noise from planes or helicopters penetrates every spot on earth, including, of course, my own house, where I am so proud of the silence. 

    Rachel Nuwer, who wrote the BBC.com article about finding quiet places, suggests that if you were to sit still and listen, right there where you are now, you would hear the hum of your computer (mine is a laptop and doesn't hum), the ticking of a clock (there are no ticking clocks in my house), the electric murmur of a refrigerator (once an hour or so, for three seconds, at my house) or an air conditioner (which I don't have), or the faint hum of a car passing by. I can hear cars on the road half a mile away, but infrequently. At the moment, in fact, with the window open, I hear only the occasional buzz of a fly or bee, the creak of the wood-burning stove as the fire settles, and—what was that?—a ground squirrel, maybe, scurrying across the deck. 

    And then for a short time this afternoon I could hear the low hum of some neighbor's motorized something, half a mile away.

    This comparative silence at my house on the mountain leaves room for "nature's melodies," which, Rachel Nuwer says, might be what our souls are really craving. There is no place on earth free of human-caused noise, but absolute silence isn't what we need. What we need is to free ourselves of human-caused noise, whenever and wherever we can, and then listen to what the earth is telling us. What we need is to rest our ears in the silence of natural noises. What we need is to take the conveniences electrical appliances give us (heat pumps, for instance) and balance that convenience with the need for quiet spaces in our lives.