Sounds of Silence

There is music on the walk with my dog today.  Finally, after this eternally long winter, the birds are singing.  What an amazing sound it is.  It feels busy and alive. I actually have a physical reaction -- a direct shot of endorphins to my body. Our puppy stops to listen too.  It sounds different, fresh and new and joyful.  All the things winter was not. It gives me hope.  It fills me with the reassurance that nature hasn’t let me down, and spring renewal is coming.  That’s something worth breathing in for more than a second.

For the quiet months of winter, the dog and I had mostly silent walks.  The woodpeckers were even quiet.  We have had so much snow, that mostly we listened to the sound of my boots crunching along, every step a battle against a bitter harsh world.    

There was one thing that broke the monotony of it. Some nights under clear skies and a bright moon, we got a treat. We have a couple of owls in the neighborhood.  I’m sure they watched from their silent perch, every time we braved the cold for an evening walk.  But on occasion they spoke, deep and low and slow.  Back and forth they called, Whooooo. Whoooo. 

If your not paying attention you’ll miss it altogether.  It’s very subtle, much too quiet to echo.  But it does, inside me.  Each time I hear them I feel unbelievably lucky to be present in that moment.  But there is something else.  Something about their tone, and the notes they sing .  It’s truly like they are speaking directly to me.  Only I can’t understand.  I long to know what they’re feeling.  Are they happy or sad, are they lonely or content?  It calms and haunts at the same time somehow.

Maybe it touches my heart so deeply because of the similarity to something else in my world today.  Our life blessed with a sometimes moody but mostly sweet, thoughtful, and by all accounts typical teenager is a little like living with a soulful hoot owl; emerging from time to time to speak, but most times, staring silently at the world around him.  As hard as I try to understand, much of what happens in his quiet world lies just beyond my reach.  Our conversations usually touch on the surface things, “How was your day?”

“How was your test?”

“What was for lunch?”

We don’t get much deeper than that, even though I know there’s a lot more going on in that head.  It’s nothing different than what any other parent of a teenager goes through I suppose, but that doesn’t make it any easier to encounter those big round eyes I’ve been gazing into since he was an infant, looking back at me with a curious unfamiliar stare that covers up so much.  And I wonder, are you happy or sad, content or lonely?  You can ask, but what you get back will be pretty similar to what I’m hearing from somewhere high and lost in the trees of my neighborhood.  You have to pay attention, or miss your chances at understanding any of it.

It leaves me with no choice but to trust in nature, and trust in the groundwork we’ve laid in all our years of parenting to date.  Trust the village we’ve surrounded him with, the positive influences he has available to reach out to if he needs to.  It leaves me calm and haunted at the same time, somehow trusting that he will find his way, but realizing that watching from my distance is so much harder than it was to walk it myself as a teenager.  Trust that all this snow will eventually melt and the birds will sing and spring will once again let us know that we’ve made it through a long journey safe and sound on the other side.