Hello darkness, my old friend
I’ve come to talk with you again
Because a vision softly creeping
Left its seeds while I was sleeping
And the vision that was planted in my brain
Still remains
Within the sound of silence                                                                                                     Paul Simon, The Sounds of Silence (1964)

Since adolescence, I have been a fan of Simon and Garfunkel. Sitting in my basement, the family record player my only companion, I sang with teenage gusto, belting out Cecilia, I am a Rock, Scarborough Fair, Bridge Over Troubled Water, and–of course–The Sound of Silence.

At 13, what did I know about darkness or the sound of silence? Nada. My life was filled with the near constant chatter of other teenage girls–and occasionally, blessedly, teenage boys–the family dinner table talk, the top 40 from the local radio station, and tunes from the few albums my sisters and I bought with our collective allowances. I knew nothing of the darkness of silence in Paul Simon’s lyrics; yet as I sang, his words committed to memory, I came to believe that I did.

At 61, I can honestly say that I can sing Simon’s words with more genuine understanding. Like most, I can say hello darkness, my old friend and mean it. Like most, I can speak personally of the moments, the days, the months that I have lived within and through the sound of silence. 

About a quarter mile down the old highway this morning, I realized that the summer songs of the cardinals, the buntings, the finches and orioles were missing. In their place, crickets–and a far-off raw cry from a crow. Against this background of white noise, I found myself turning inward when–in weeks past–I looked outward and upward, searching the ditches, the cottonwoods, and the sky for songbirds. With no flashes of color or sweet melodies to pull me outward, I turned in. Soon, I realized that I had walked a mile, lost in thought and crickets, and had not seen a thing.

In the sanctuary of silence, there is often that inward pull, that dive into the subterranean nether world of self. Robert Frost writes of this in his poem, “Desert Places”:

They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars – on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.  

The first real time that I experienced my own desert places was during the summer of my freshman year of college when I was cleaning motel rooms for summer employment. At first, I reveled in the silence of my days. (Remember, this was before walkmans, iPods, smart phones–before Pandora, for heaven’s sake!) Armed with Lime Away and Comet, I scrubbed showers and sinks, losing myself in visions of future love and life. With each new room, I rewound the vision and began again, with new and better love and life. Who pays people for reveries like this? I marveled.

Until the day I stooped to pick up a mound of damp towels and was surprised by silence. Momentarily dizzy and disoriented, I felt myself slipping into a kind of cognitive quicksand that engulfed me, stretching endlessly into shadow. As I threw back the shower curtain to clean, I shook my head, hoping that this simple physical act would return me to solid ground.

And then I understood: for weeks I had been cocooned in daydreams, each more sparkling than the last, each packed with brilliant possibilities, but no longer. That day, I entered my own desert places. The daydreams gone, day-terrors rushed in. Armed with guilt and worry, I began to scour the dark corners of my soul.  I could not stop thinking, worrying, sinking.   Hello darkness, my old friend. 

Years later when I had accepted a new college teaching position, I moved during the summer, believing that I would be able to organize my new office and make some faculty connections before the fall semester. I quickly realized, however, that this was not going to happen until much later in the summer. So, I was stuck in my apartment, in a new town, with literally no one I knew except for those who had interviewed me. For three weeks, I did not speak to a soul face-to-face. Given my limited budget (and before cell phones), I made one phone call a week to my parents, and then I lived in silence.

Until the day when, girded with resolve and sickened by my own thoughts, I set out on a walk, determined to speak with someone, anyone who appeared at least half-way approachable. In these days, this was completely out of character for me and took me far beyond the boundaries of my comfort zone. Still, I found a college student walking along the same path and spoke to him. Three weeks of silence ended with that simple hello. We walked and talked, ultimately becoming friends.

In my youth, I was naive to think that silence would always present pleasant places for visions and revisions. It was inevitable that, one day, I would find my own desert places in silence. Through age and maturity, I have come to regard silence as much more of a sanctuary than a desert place. With soulful conditioning, I have trained myself to steer clear of the quicksands of all-consuming guilt and worry. Most days, that is. I would be lying if I claimed total absolution from darkness.

Still, as I walked this morning, I found words flooding the void that songbirds had recently filled. I wrote as I walked, I shaped–and reshaped–new ideas. I recalled the words my granddaughter had spoken to me last night. I mentally sang the lyrics of a new song I have come to love. Hello silence, my new friend. 

It goes without saying that the sanctuary of silence takes conditioning. You have to build up to it, giving yourself permission to retreat to the safety of sound when you find yourself without a lifeline. There are no purple hearts in the sanctuary of silence, but I think there should be.

When I see someone sitting in a waiting room or airport terminal sans ear buds or smart phone, someone just sitting and looking on at the life around them, I want to approach them with a medal of commendation and welcome them, brothers and sisters alike, into the sanctuary of silence.