Pop 89: Quiet Nights, Holy Nights
By Madonna Hamel
If you love the truth, seek silence. That’s what St. Issac of Syria said. He was a 4th-century monk, a “desert father” who headed to the desert wilderness to live and listen to the silence. The desert mothers and fathers took very little with them. The holy path, they believed, was a path of subtraction.
When I arrived in Val Marie with a carload of books and sweaters, I gave myself over a month of writing and walking. And to recover from my paradoxical quests for both stimulation and respite. The vastness of the prairie encouraged me to empty myself into the silence. My friend Matthew, a pilgrimage studies prof, suggested to me that I was becoming a desert mother.
Roused by the birds at 5 in the morning, I rose from my little bed in the tiny, bright Mother Superior’s cell in the basement of The Convent Inn. I dressed in warm clothes and big socks and padded my way up two narrow flights of stairs to the kitchen, where I made my coffee. While waiting for it to brew, I’d stand in an early morning stupor, gazing absently at the blackboard before me. Once a school for farm kids - my mom being one of them - the Convent kept its blackboards, encouraging visitors to share their favourite quotes, including “The wind gives the grass a voice, the grass gives the wind a face.” And “In life, there’s rarely justice, but there’s always mercy.”
My office was the Convent chapel, with a solid wooden desk at one end and an altar at the other. Every morning, I checked the altar for new offerings from guests - a tarot card, a pebble or a shell - until finally, I sat to my task at hand: editing. Delete, undo, backspace, escape. I was not sure what I wanted to say anymore. Until then, my wanderings were driven by a belief that “There has to be something more than this!” Now I found myself saying: “There has to be something less than this. Good writing is all about editing, after all. As Pascal, mathematician and theologian, once wrote to a friend: “If I had more time, I would have written you a shorter letter.”
I’d been on the road for nine years. Couch-surfing, subletting, taking care of my dad after my mom died, running down to the States to be with my fiancé. And now, miraculously, I was sitting still and writing in a silent room. There was solace in the fact that, beyond the door, the silence extended and expanded ever outward and beyond.
On my first night out, I was invited by the Convent Inn proprietors to meet a couple of the locals at the hotel bar. I tried to explain my new love of silence to the nature photographer who moved here five years earlier.
“You’ve been talking nonstop about silence for 15 minutes now,” he teased.
“Yeah, well, I’ve been alone for a month. “
“Fair enough. But I sure as hell don’t know what you mean about silence. Those crazy birds wake me up at 4:30 every morning with their racket!”
“Ok. You have a point. I wake to a thousand voices.” But, I point out, they’re bird voices in the morning, not police cars tearing down Dundas Street all night. They’re not junkies shooting up and tripping out in the alley. Or the emergency helicopter overhead, with its landing light piercing through the skylight, hunting for the landing pad on the roof of St. Micheal’s hospital next door. I prefer waking to robins and wrens rather than the television left on all night, broadcasting trivia and tragedy at the foot of my bed where an ex snores noisily, passed out on the couch.”
“Point taken. There are no police in Val Marie, let alone police cars!” says the photographer.
Those first mornings in Val Marie I would lay in my little bed in my little room and try to discern between bird call and response, consternation and exultation, information and alert. I heard long, plaintive wooing and short, sharp warnings. I heard songs. I heard wings and tail feathers catching the wind, making winnowing and whipping sounds. I still can’t make out calling from falling, and I have yet to tell the difference between rejecting and welcoming, affirming and yearning, clarifying and clearing off. And I’ll never know if sparrows know what the robins are saying about them. Or if the mourning dove, a bird of constant sorrow, even cares. But I do know this: I’m in a country where the inhabitants speak in several languages, all at once, most of which I’ve never heard before.
However, birds are finding it harder to hear each other, writes Ed Yong in his book, “An Immense World.” Increasing sound levels worldwide are forcing birds to sing louder and at higher frequencies. “Urban and industrial noise can also change the timing of birds’ songs, suppress the complexity of their calls and prevent them from finding mates….Strange noises mean birds spend more time looking for danger and less time looking for food.” It occurs to me that strange bumps in the night distract us humans as well. They keep us hyper-vigilant, make us jittery, divert us from relaxation, focus, the nobler pursuits of compassion, absorption in creativity, and ultimate truth.
“Every animal is enclosed within its own sensory bubble,” continues Yong, “perceiving but a tiny sliver of an immense world.” We humans, always in search of peace and quiet, are also the animals who make all the noise. But the quieter we become, the wider and sharper becomes our perception of other animals.
Val Marie is the gateway to Grasslands National Park, where, a decade ago, acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton measured levels of human-made noise. Discerning between natural sound and unnatural noise, he dubbed Grasslands the quietest place in North America. The nights remain silent; may this holy silence ever remain.