Every Sunday Creative Nonfiction releases a “Sunday Short Read.” These are always worth reading, and I found this one especially good in its use of similes and metaphors. One can identify with virtually all of them in this piece, and they add a richness that makes the simple ending ever more powerful.
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I’m sorry I’ve lost the attribution for this quote — if anyone can help me here, I’d be grateful. Meanwhile, I thank the nameless writer for some important thoughts about what we need to start paying attention to.
Hello chatter, my old friend.
The sounds of silence are a dim recollection now, like mystery, privacy and paying attention to one thing — or one person — at a time.
As far back as half-a-century ago, the Swiss philosopher Max Picard warned: “Nothing has changed the nature of man so much as the loss of silence,” once as natural as the sky and air.
As fiendish little gadgets conspire to track our movements and record our activities wherever we go, producing a barrage of pictures of everything we’re doing and saying, our lives will unroll as one long instant replay.
There will be fewer and fewer of what Virginia Woolf called “moments of being,” intense sensations that stand apart from the “cotton wool of daily life.”
“In the future, not getting any imagery or story line or content is going to be the equivalent of silence because people are so filled up now with streaming video,” said Ed Schlossberg, the artist, author and designer who runs ESI Design. “Paying attention to anything will be the missing commodity in future life. You think you’ll miss nothing, but you’ll probably miss everything.”
Photo by Coral Jewell
Published in the Spring 2018 issue of Sky Island Journal, this is an excerpt from the forthcoming memoir, Evelio’s Garden: Memoir of a Naturalist in Costa Rica.
Now, in the still, moonlit nights, insomnia has company.
Wup, wup, whoo, whoooo.
An owl challenges the jungle of the quebrada by the house. Everyone marvels at how tranquil our place is, but they’re used to the noises of cities and towns. Out here the sounds drop into the night silence like thunder.
It begins with the owl. From our quebrada he calls to another in the quebrada to the south. A small echo coming back, saying what?
Crickets playing a triad – two tones perfectly spaced at a third – offer a metallic accompaniment.
The cicadas who screamed at sunset have already exploded and left their empty shells in the crannies of the trees.
A distant dog barks.
Later, no matter what the moon, a pack of coyotes hurls its protest at the stars. Little Flor – separated by millennia from her sisters – still remembers to howl in tune.
In the ceiling, all night long, the bats are chirping fussily over their busy comings and goings. There is the muffled beating of wings against the small, dusty spaces.
A gecko rustles across the skylight, and I hear the flat-footed thump of the cat’s paws on the kitchen counter, a better vantage point for contemplating the gecko’s tempting silhouette in the moonlight.
Even later, a small but insistent mew from the cat: she wants out.
The pump decides to gurgle, even though no one is drawing any water.
The breeze, blowing from the volcano, sighs back and forth like the ocean, and the great crossed limbs of the guanacaste tree groan against each other like two quarrelsome lovers in their sleep.
A lamp burns in my tiny room as my pen scratches across the page. It attracts an abejón that buzzes his frustration against the screen. There’s a hole in the screen, but he hasn’t found it yet.
In the small hours a far-off rooster crows.
Later, at five – right on time – the King of the howler monkeys roars in the dawn. He knows when the sun is about to rise. The rooster hasn’t figured it out.
Night sounds in the campo. I never feel alone. As I look out the window above my bed, lights out at last, I see the pale moon and constellations swinging through the bowl of blue and, distantly, ever so faintly, I can hear – beyond all the chirping and chatter of nearby things – the music of the planet tilting toward the sun.
(An earlier version appeared on this blog in the series on the use of our senses in writing.)
Holding
You place the heel of my hand
against your brow
so that my fingers spread out
over the curve of your head
settling down into your hair.
I laugh. Why are you doing that,
I ask. To hold the top down,
you answer. It feels good
To hold your head like this –
large and round like a melon,
you say, solid and field warm.
I want to be your head
under my hand, feeling held,
contained, all there. I am
both me, holding, and you, held –
all one, all the same.
Our bodies shift in the dark
and my hand slips away.
You put it back. We cannot
have enough of this oneness –
and, feeling it, we do not sleep.
Junto Magazine, December 2017
How is it that the human hand is so perfectly designed to play with kittens? You stalk your fingers deliberately across the floor and he crouches, revving up his hind legs for the pounce. You roll him over and tickle his belly while he grabs you around the wrist with his forepaws and tries to kick your fingers away with his hind feet. You scoot your hand quickly out from behind a table leg and back again, and he gives chase in a perfect feline ring-around-the-rosy. Or you slide your hand under the bedclothes and suddenly poke up a finger and he comes hopping sideways across the blanket, back arched, tail fluffed up, to attack. But best of all, is swooping him up into your lap where, with the softest stroking of your index finger across his tiny forehead, he falls instantly to sleep.
© 2015, Sandra Shaw Homer
Photo by Marten Jager