After spending forty days in silence in an isolated house on a windy moor, Maitland found that her physical sensations were heightened (she was overwhelmed by the deliciousness of porridge, heard different notes in the wind, was more sensitive to temperature, and more emotional); she became what she calls ‘disinhibited’ (a Jungian notion that once alone you are free to do what you want — pick your nose while eating, strip your clothes off, abandon grooming, wash infrequently); and she heard voices (a young girl, then a male choir singing in Latin, which she thinks may have been the wind). She also experienced great happiness, felt connected with the cosmos, was exhilarated by the risk and peril in what she was doing, and discovered a fierce joy, or bliss.
Maitland rails against the idea of silence as void, absence, and lack — something that we must rush to fill — insisting it is positive and nurturing, and something more profound that should be actively sought. (When silence is imposed, of course, it is something entirely different.)
It’s well established that unwanted noise is bad for our health, which is why hospital engineers, architects and staff are constantly urged to find ways to keep the ward hubbub, and the high-decibel sounds of tech equipment and corridor clatter, low. As Florence Nightingale wrote back in 1859, ‘Unnecessary noise, then, is the most cruel absence of care which can be inflicted either on the sick or well.’
SILENCE IS NOT JUST the absence of noise, or even unnecessary noise. It is the absence of noise made by human beings. It is rare, and shrinking. American acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton, the man known as the ‘Sound Tracker’, defines it as ‘the complete absence of all audible mechanical vibrations, leaving only the sounds of nature at her most natural’. True quiet, he says, is the ‘think tank of the soul’.
The real joy of silence is not about blocking out the noise, but reconnecting with, or listening to, the land. This wisdom is a place where hippies, scientists, Indigenous people, wilderness lovers and the rest of us motley crew can meet. When I was living in New York, I interviewed Hempton, who then had circled the Earth three times recording sound on every continent except Antarctica, and become increasingly disturbed by the disappearance of silence from even the most remote places. He has walked through the Australian outback and the Kalahari Desert, along the edges of volcanoes and deep into forests to track sound. For him, the Earth is a ‘solar-powered jukebox’.
Hempton’s conversion to sound came one night when, as a twenty-seven-year-old botany student, he slept in a cornfield for a night. He heard crickets, then rolling thunder, then stayed still as a storm passed over him, listening. He was drenched but delirious, wondering, ‘How could I be twenty-seven years old and never have truly listened before?’ From then on, he carried a microphone and tape recorder with him everywhere, ‘obsessively listening — freight trains, hobos — it was a flood of sensation’.
Now Hempton’s passion is the preservation of true natural silence, which he describes not as the ‘absence of something, but the presence of everything.’ It is many sounds, he says:
Silence is the moonlit song of the coyote signing the air, and the answer of its mate. It is the falling whisper of snow that will later melt with an astonishing reggae rhythm so crisp that you will want to dance to it. It is the sound of pollinating winged insects vibrating soft tunes as they defensively dart in and out of the pine boughs to temporarily escape the breeze, a mix of insect hum and pine sigh that will stick with you all day. Silence is the passing flock of chestnut-backed chickadees and red-breasted nuthatches, chirping and fluttering, reminding you of your own curiosity.
Today, Hempton says, we are being deprived of an essential need that our distant ancestors had met — to be in nature. Even our national parks, he says, are being flooded with noise pollution, especially overhead aircraft. He describes silence as a marvel. ‘Besides spending time away from the damaging noise impacts present at our workplace, neighbourhoods, and homes,’ he told me, ‘we are given the opportunity not only to heal but discover something incredible — the presence of life, interwoven! Do you know what it sounds like to listen for 20 miles in every direction? That is more than 1000 square miles. When I listen to a naturally silent place and hear nature at its most natural, it is no longer merely sound; it is music. And like all music, good or bad, it affects us deeply . . . In evolution, earlids never developed, but eyelids did. And to those who know that true listening is worship, silence is one of nature’s most transformative sermons. I am filled with gratitude to have heard it.’
WHAT’S INTERESTING ABOUT SILENCE is not just the extremism, often verging on madness, of those who can claim to have truly lived or worked silently: the Arctic explorer, the deep-sea diver, the sailor, the hermit, the ascetic, the nun. What is also important is what the rest of us can wring from the more mundane moments of stillness. We won’t all skip nude through the Scottish bracken, or inhabit caves in Tibetan mountains, but we can experience silence in ways so potent they become addictive: the magical quiet of swimming under the sea; the uninterrupted hush after midnight; the sweet intimacy between a mother and her baby being nursed in the wee hours; the breathless stillness after excellent sex; the calm of meditation; the loosening of muscles during the Savasana pose in yoga; the hush of awe while gazing at a proud, ancient mountain or soaring down the green tunnel of a wave. Even if it is not pure silence, it can be enough.
The idea of quietly staring at a rock, piles of sand, or blinking stars for hours, if not weeks, seems, weirdly, profoundly countercultural today, in a world where people tweet bubbles, livestream the arching of eyebrows and spend holidays distracted by how best to market themselves on Instagram #goals #bestlife. Are we even capable of being still without our hands darting for our phones? Yet if generations of mystics and seekers have insisted that something connects silence with the sublime, you have to wonder who we could be if we paused more often.
JUST LIKE THE NEED for country, the need to pause is not a modern discovery but an ancient truth. Indigenous Australians, inheritors of the world’s oldest living culture, have long known that sometimes, in order to learn, you need to slow down, shut up and allow yourself to sit in silence. Which is exactly what my TV crew and I were told to do when we entered the sacred ceremonial grounds at Gulkula in North East Arnhem Land, the home of the Yolgnu clan.
While speeding along the red dirt road to the campsite for the Garma Festival of Traditional Cultures in 2018, I carefully read the ‘behaviour protocols’ provided by the Yothu Yindi Foundation. They state: ‘Remember you are on Yolngu land and entering Yolngu time. Yolngu perceptions, priorities and preoccupations are different from those of mainstream Australia. Be patient, and try to leave at home your expectations of how things are learnt, and how events should run. Traditionally, Yolngu learn by observation, by looking and listening. Asking too many questions can be inappropriate. So when you have questions, choose them carefully and thoughtfully.’
Winnowing questions can be a challenge for a journalist. But doing just that, sitting back with my eyes open and my two ears cocked, resulted in one of the most intense experiences of my life, a shift and shake of the kaleidoscope. It was an enormous privilege to be briefly immersed in this ancient, calm, respectful tradition, during the country’s largest gathering of Indigenous elders, and recognise the lived, enduring shame of the treatment of Indigenous Australians as well as the depth of their spiritual and cultural traditions. These myriad, dynamic and compelling traditions should be a source of immense pride to us, just as the Maori culture is to New Zealanders; the atavistic wisdom contained in these cultures connects us to our land in ways we still barely fathom, and has done for more than 65,000 years.
Aboriginal people have been telling us for decades to listen to country. At a time when we are addicted to screens, filter our own faces in selfies, exercise on machines and talk to robots, wondering why there is so much anxiety and depression, can there be any more potent call than to slow, forget ourselves, sit under trees and stars and listen to country and to those who inherited it from their ancestors?
On our last morning at Garma we went to a sacred women’s crying ceremony held at 5.30 am as the sky lightened from black. Female Aboriginal elders — the matriarchs — cried for their land and their people, mourned, and comforted and called to each other. We sat in silence, ringed by smouldering fires and eucalypts on a ridge with views of the far-off sea, transfixed. It was suffering and solace in song, a lament of love, a raw paean to life. It was unlike anything I have ever heard. And, at the end, the women paused and one elder said: ‘And now we wait for the bird to sing.’ One minute later, it did.
Now, said the elder, ‘You have been welcomed by the old ladies’ — the greatest of honours. The Garma protocols say: ‘Treat old people with the greatest of respect — they hold the knowledge and the power.’ It was understood that we would respect the wisdom of these women, who create and sustain life. I went home and told my kids — to their mirth — that being welcomed by the ‘old ladies’ really meant ‘bow down to your queens’.
One of those old ladies is the remarkable Miriam-Rose Ungunmerr-Baumann, an elder from the Nauiyu community of the Daly River in the Northern Territory, who believes that the greatest gift her people can give to fellow Australians is a respect for silence, and alert, calm contemplation. This is called many different names in different Indigenous languages across Australia, but in her Ngangikurungkurr language it is known as dadirri and means, specifically, ‘inner, deep listening and quiet, still awareness’.
‘Everyone’s got it,’ she says. ‘It’s just that they haven’t [all] found it.’
It’s a reminder of how daft and ignorant white Australians have been in — at best — riding roughshod over Aboriginal traditions, and in forgetting how much we have to learn from the ancient inhabitants of this land, who have a sacred, unique understanding of it, and a strong sense of community, of family.
In a reflection, Miriam Rose, a Christian Indigenous elder, explains:
Dadirri recognises the deep spring that is inside us. We call on it and it calls to us. This is the gift that Australia is thirsting for. It is something like what you call ‘contemplation’.
When I experience dadirri, I am made whole again. I can sit on the riverbank or walk through the trees; even if someone close to me has passed away, I can find my peace in this silent awareness. There is no need of words. A big part of dadirri is listening. Through the years, we have listened to our stories. They are told and sung, over and over, as the seasons go by. Today we still gather around the campfires and together we hear the sacred stories.
The contemplative way of dadirri spreads over our whole life. It renews us and brings us peace. It makes us feel whole again . . .
In our Aboriginal way, we learnt to listen from our earliest days. We learnt by watching and listening, waiting and then acting . . . There is no need to reflect too much and to do a lot of thinking. It is just being aware.
My people are not threatened by silence. They are completely at home in it. They have lived for thousands of years with Nature’s quietness. My people today recognise and experience in this quietness the great Life-giving Spirit, the Father of us all. It is easy for me to experience God’s presence. When I am out hunting, when I am in the bush, among the trees, on a hill or by a billabong; these are the times when I can simply be in God’s presence . . .
Our Aboriginal culture has taught us to be still and to wait. We do not try to hurry things up. We let them follow their natural course — like the seasons. We watch the moon in each of its phases. We wait for the rain to fill our rivers and water the thirsty earth . . . When twilight comes, we prepare for the night. At dawn we rise with the sun.
We don’t like to hurry. There is nothing more important than what we are attending to. There is nothing more urgent that we must hurry away for.
We wait on God, too. His time is the right time . . .
To be still brings peace — and it brings understanding. When we are really still in the bush, we concentrate. We are aware of the anthills and the turtles and the water lilies. Our culture is different. We are asking our fellow Australians to take time to know us, to be still and to listen to us . . .
In greeting each morning, remind yourself of dadirri by blessing yourself with the following: Let tiny drops of stillness fall gently through my day.’