Through the Silence

Spring is so dynamically sensory. After months of dead silence, bland white snow, dead trees, dark and dreary clouds - Spring creeps up on us and suddenly everything is alive. Green grass, budding trees, a palette of colorful flowers replaces the never ending piles of sludge and snow. Spring peepers, frogs, birds, crickets, cars splashing through puddles, rain and thunder replace the eerie stillness of winter. The sun pokes out, white puffy clouds that look like cars, dragons, and other miscellaneous things left to the imagination take the place of a monotonous gray sky.

Spring makes you smell, touch, feel, see, create - it refreshes you, rejuvenates you. Spring makes things anew. 

For me, Nature has always been a way for me to connect and reconnect with God. Growing up in a small town, with not much to do for entertainment, the outdoors became my movie theater, my classroom, my playground. I explored the woods, I climbed trees, I hunted and dug for frogs, tadpoles, worms, and turtles. I biked through wildflower lined back roads. I walked through cornfields and sunflower fields. I swam in rivers and lakes until sundown. 

G.K. Chesterton equated Nature and the world as the stage, life as the play, and humans as the actors. The stage is beautiful and perfect, but the actors move things, wreck things, say things out of line, or create props that shouldn't be there - we ruin this perfect thing that was created for us. 

However, I believe that as "actors" it is perfectly acceptable for us to explore this great big stage. Comedian and actor Louis C.K. once said, "'I'm bored' is a useless thing to say. I mean you live in a great, big, vast world that you've seen none percent of. Even the inside of your own mind is endless, it goes on forever inwardly. Do you understand? The fact that you're alive is amazing, so you don't get to say 'I'm bored.'"

As spring has sprung here finally, this quote was a sobering thought for me. "I'm bored" is something that slips out of my mouth so frequently. But if we just take a moment to get out there and do something, even if we're alone in doing it, it's amazing what we can discover. 

With the birds chirping and the grass greening, and nobody to play with on a beautiful Saturday, I just couldn't let myself waste the warm, sunny day away even if I was alone in doing it. So I did something that I've never done in my life: I took a long walk... all by myself. For some reason, I hate taking walks by myself because I feel like people look at me and think I'm either A. a loner B. a loser or C. somebody who has no friends. 

But I pushed those thoughts aside and went anyway. I was becoming the exploring "actor" in the newly propped Spring stage. I explored a quiet little neighborhood where no cars passed me. A large black dog lied lazily on a front lawn; he peeked up at me as I passed by, too lazy to say hi or get up and bark. I looked at beautiful homes, secretly wishing I could own such a home someday. I walked to a park, sat on a bench and looked at the lake still covered in ice, like God's giant cup full of ice cubes and water. I walked by swamps, trees, a lazy brook, a pond. I whistled back to the Chickadees when no one was around me. The sun beat down and warmed my skin to the touch. 

I was utterly alone. But not once was I bored. Stuck going to school in a "city" for four years (anything over 10,000 is a city to me) I sometimes felt that that part of me who had such a relationship with the land and nature has slowly stripped away. I was becoming desensitized to the beauty of nature. In the city, the sound of waves or birds are muted by the never ending stream of cars. Stars are dim, hardly seen at all, or obstructed by buildings. "Lakes" in the city are barely clean enough to swim in and are surrounded by more cars, more buildings, and plenty of public beaches. You are never alone. You are constantly surrounded by the buzz of busy people and sound. sound. sound. 

Spring, a bit of silence, and my ability to push through being alone on a walk helped recreate and rebuild that relationship I once had with nature. I urge you, reader, to step out and explore what God has created - not man - even for a little while. See what you can hear, even through the silence.