Silver Joy — Damien Jurado

#365Songs: January 7

I’ve lived in cities for the majority of my life, with a few brief in-between periods in the mountains. My ADHD brain is drawn to chaos, claustrophobic sound, distractions. Sirens, voices, car horns, bus brakes, train whistles, leaf blowers, construction. When it’s all too much, I drown it out with music. Until the pandemic, I never allowed for silence.

I’m reminded of panic attacks and that feeling of being too high: the way noise is vacuumed out of a space and every sound is of note. Silence for so long meant trouble. An unquiet mind on attack.

And yet, I’ve long been drawn to silent literature.

To Proust: “The voyage of discovery is not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.”

To Dillard: “I woke in bits, like all children, piecemeal over the years. I discovered myself and the world, and forgot them, and discovered them again.”

To Thoreau: “You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment.”

To Aciman: “The world is not just black and white, and things are not always what you expect them to be.”

To Chödrön: “It’s a transformative experience to simply pause instead of immediately filling up the space.”

What does it mean to slow down, to take in, and feel every detail? The squirrel in search of a just buried nut, the buzz of a sunflower, the patterns of church bells? I don’t miss pandemic fear, but I do yearn for our collective slow down, that rebirth with nature, and our relationship to what breathes within the noise.

Let me sleep
In the slumber of the morning
There’s nowhere I need to be
And my dreams are still calling

Our lives don’t allow us to slow down. Work calls, kids cry for more more more, do this do that hurry up not enough get that get this now now now. We slow down, sort of, during the holidays, and then speed back up the moment the calendar flips a number. Chaos is killing us, and life slips by.

Lay your troubles on the ground
No need to worry about them now
Daylight shaking through the trees
Do not disturb me, let me be

In silence, we discover. In rest, we reset. But where is the time for such a thing when the world keeps coming, when expectations mount, when debts wait without patience?

And if you need a place a land
Or come down when you are weary
No more clouds to put away
In the slumber of the morning

Keep me with you on the ground
All of my worries behind me now
Daylight shaking through the trees
Do not disturb me, let me be
Let me sleep

Perspective lives in silent moments, when we resist our restlessness and recognize the need within us. For so many of us, the pandemic was the first time we’d stopped moving because moving is all we know. And now that the pandemic is over we’re all being asked to move again, too fast, away from the silence.

In the slumber of tomorrow
There’s nowhere we need to be
That will not be there after
Keep me with you on the ground
All of my worries behind me now
And be sure to wake me when
Eternity begins

For now at least until I forget again and get drawn back into the chaos, I’m committed to taking that extra deep breath, to noticing a flower I’ve never seen before, to listening for sounds that remind me that few things are more important than peace.

~

Start following the #365Songs playlist today, and listen to each new song with each new article!