We are officially in Phase 2 of reopening here, and while I am looking forward to doing some things we haven't done for a long time, just getting out into the wild is sublime.
The evening we went to the river in these pictures, I put on my rubber boots and straw hat, took my camera, and wandered through the trees along the river. I took in textures and colors, shadows and sparkles, and I listened.
I’ve been thinking about acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton’s Sanctuaries of Silence. A true sensitive, I love silence, but by silence I mean without human sounds. Gordon Hempton defines silence not as the absence of sound but the absence of noise from modern life. I feel this deeply when I’m out in the wild and it’s one of the reasons I love it so much. For me this is true sound - free of human static.
As Gordon Hempton says, silence is a presence. A quiet place is “the think tank of the soul.”
Some good things:
Gordon Hempton - Silence and the Presence of Everything.