BENEATH THE SKYLINE

BEING QUIET

Deborah Good

"We can make our minds so like still water that beings gather about us that they may see, it may be, their own images, and so live for a moment with a clearer, perhaps even with a fiercer life because of our quiet."—W. B. Yeats

I am not very good at "quiet," at allowing for open spaces in my life, breathing and still. I have a well-practiced habit of filling my silent moments with noise and productivity, the open slots on my calendar with people and plans.

But just weeks ago I moved for the summer from the bustle of Philadelphia to a small community in the woods of West Virginia. I left behind several different involvements and jobs, church and friends and soccer teams. I moved from a neighborhood block of easily two hundred people to a tract of land in the Blue Ridge Mountains blanketed with trees.

My first night here, I went on a walk around dusk. I saw fourteen deer—nearly twice the number of people who live within walking distance of my new home.

I awoke this morning without an alarm—something I never did in my old life. I heated the stove for oatmeal, then threw in sunflower seeds, walnuts, a spoon’s worth of brown sugar, and raisins, which bulked up in the boiling water. I ate my oatmeal, fed the cat, and threw on old jeans ripped at the knees.

The garden is in its birthing stages now. Red- and green-leaf lettuce are up. The peas’ tender leaves spring from rows of shoots standing proudly in the morning sunlight. Today, we planted tomatoes, digging holes into the mountain clay, laying in compost. "Grow, little plant, where we plant you," said Vivian, a woman in her sixties who teaches me about vegetables and birds, who notices tiny seedlings and animal footprints on our walks through the woods. "Grow, grow, grow," she says.

We broke for lunch and then for community prayers—just the two of us today—for which we sat mostly in silence, read a psalm. Afterward, we parted ways for the afternoon. I walked home down one woodsy path, Vivian another. In the hours since, I’ve gone on a short hike, napped, read, checked e-mail, and watched the rain fall, all the while trying to find a way through my writer’s fog—not a complete "writer’s block" but a fog I navigated with patience and procrastination—to this space where I now sit, typing.

This is more quiet than I have ever known.

Shortly before moving here, I was describing my summer plans to a (slightly older and wiser) friend over breakfast. "If I get too bored, I’ll just make trips to be with friends in the city," I told him.

"No, if you get bored," he said, "I think you need to stick it out, sit with the boredom, and not run away."

"Oh, you’re such a Trappist," I said, laughing. This same friend used to teach high school and once took a dozen or so of us students to visit a Trappist monastery in Massachusetts. The Trappists are a Roman Catholic religious order known for their disciplined silence.

We read Frank Bianco’s Voices of Silence (Achor, 1992), in preparation for the trip. In it, a monk describes how inner "monsters" came out during his initial months of silence, all the memories and emotions, self-dislike, and unprocessed experiences he had locked away in his unconscious.

I pictured these figurative monsters living in my own dark chasms. With enough idle solitude and silence, I imagined they would emerge from their cages, drooling, growling, flailing their arms and legs. They would take seats in a circle and glare at me with eyes like small oceans and mouths like fire.

Perhaps this is why we, as a general rule, are so afraid of being quiet, idle, and alone. We practically shun it. I know that as a young, single woman in the city, I often preferred to surround myself with people and noise lest anyone, and most of all myself, think I was a loner, shy and antisocial, quietly becoming an old maid.

Wandering through a bookstore in Denver, I came across Florence Falk’s recent book, On My Own: The Art of Being a Woman Alone (Random House, 2007). It was refreshing to read the jacket, to hear the author countering assumptions about singlehood, especially for women, by claiming that solitude is ripe with possibility.

She describes two opposing impulses in our lives: "One causes us to yearn to make close connections with others, and the other pulls us back into ourselves, into the need for selfhood and certainty that can only be shaped through solitude."

"We must heed both," she continues, "But in our modern culture, the former is stressed while the latter is neglected, even vilified."

I, too, stress connection. I am a social person and invest much of my energy in building relationships. Perhaps what has been most interesting to me about my solitude this summer is how not solitary it is. Others in this small community seek me out—and I them—for lunch, gardening, hiking, and trips into town.

Twice a week, I spend my afternoon teaching writing to high schoolers. Even though I live down a gravel road in the Blue Ridge Mountains, I am connected to just about everyone I know in the world by cell phone and internet (via satellite). In the weeks since I moved here, I have written letters and emails, made trips to visit friends, and started a blog. True solitude would require another plan altogether.

Even so, this time away from the city will have me looking at my life from new vantage points. "Without a certain element of solitude there can be no compassion," writes the late Thomas Merton, a Trappist monk and one of our history’s experts on silence. "When a [person] is lost in the wheels of a social machine, he is no longer aware of human needs as a matter of personal responsibility" (New Seeds of Contemplation, New Directions Publishing, 1974, p. 55).

He goes on to describe a solitude that is not a separation or escape from all that is ugly and difficult in the larger world, from people we dislike or problems we do not want to face. Merton’s solitude is one of engagement, of growing a compassion in our inner gardens that allows us to connect more deeply with others outside ourselves and, above all else, with God.

Whether I am looking for communion with God or improved mental health—or both—I cannot say. It is hard to put words to these things. But either way, my yearning for solitude has brought me to these mountains. I am learning to step into my days like open fields, to be quiet, idle, and alone—and to not be afraid of any of the three.

—Deborah Good, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, is a summer writer-in-residence at Rolling Ridge Study Retreat Community (www.rollingridge.net) near Harpers Ferry, West Virginia. Twenty-five years ago, she and her family took a five-month retreat from their lives in D.C., and lived—without electricity—in a small cottage at Rolling Ridge, which has since acquired electricity, among other things. She welcomes your thoughts and feedback at <deborahagood@gmail.com>.