She Knows What the Noise Can Do (#119)
If I hadn’t started to listen to the noise, I wouldn’t have had a world opened up to me. Plus: New bird pics and a sketch!
As an introvert I have always romanticized silence: case in point my idyllic fantasy of having my own writer’s cabin. But going to a meditation retreat removes far much more than speaking—you’re not to partake in any reading, writing, journaling, and of course no phones or digital devices are allowed. The retreat is an invitation to go completely inward in an environment that prioritizes simplicity and quiet.
, (“My first silent meditation retreat”)
I had recently read Carolyn’s interesting piece on attending a silent meditation retreat. Hard to fathom, these days: No talking, no engaging with the outside world. The only dialogue, internal, as days are spent in walking and seated meditation.
But - and as my mind is wont to do - I started walking a tangential path. I reflected on what it must have been like even spending a few days at what sounds to be an idyllic retreat from the daily grind.
It reminded me of scientific pursuits, where we try to manage the noise as best we can. In this case, the noise being any inputs that are unwanted and serve as an impediment to understanding the nature of things. If we think A caused B, we don’t want the “noise” of C, D, E, and F to muddy our interpretation and understanding of A’s influence (or lack thereof) on B.1
I suppose in this way, the retreat feels like a grand experiment with single participants, all seeking to remove the unwanted noise. In this case, the extraneous inputs come from devices, from media, from our (un)helpful minds that like to supply commentary2 - for nothing can be truly silent. We live, gloriously, in a noisy world, once we let ourselves take it in.
Example: One of the pleasures that I enjoy is the quiet of the dawn and my cup of coffee. A practice I started when the family was younger, it became a time to have for me before I donned other hats of wife/evil stepmom/researcher, etc.
But what I’ve learned through this extended silent retreat is that there isn’t really a morning quiet. The coffee machine rhythmically pumps and bubbles over ten minutes to provide that delicious nectar. The low hum of the appliances that fades into background noise (but is most definitely noticed when the power is cut during bad weather). And the outside symphony - a performance plush with chickadees and cardinals and sparrows and robins, all of which combine to make up nature’s audio lacework.
Maybe this is the irony of the silent retreat - that this false scenario opens our minds to just how noisy everything around us is.
And how much we miss when we don’t really listen.
This Week in SciArt
Bird Speak. As I watch the bird calls I record play out in audio and visual format - a graph of the tones illustration as scratches up and down a register - I thought it would be neat to illustrate their “bird speak”. I used this example as reference for the sketch below; I also wonder how it would look as ink brushwork or calligraphy.
Your Monthly (?) Bird Photos. Perhaps this is emerging as a regular feature, but I enjoy sharing some of the birding I’ve been up to over the past few weeks. So many fledglings!
Our Noisy Lives. I touched on this concept in part back in post #64 (The Key to Understand All the Secrets Stored in Man?), but have since come across this article, which became partial inspiration for today’s post. We are good at pattern recognition in sound perhaps better than visual representations - so what happens when we turn our data points into audio? Will we pick up a pattern previously undetected?
This is sometimes a criticism of some scientific work that seeks to eliminate ALL noise - that, by doing so, it doesn’t have “external validity”, or applicability, to the real world, by removing all the influence that make up our complicated realities. (Hence the value of qualitative work that seeks to embrace and document the noise.)
It wasn’t a vacuum to all sound (like those sensory deprivation pods that provide “the trip without the acid”, according to clients experiencing the complete lack of audiovisual input).
I love your little bird sketches. They’d make a cool fridge magnet.
Such lovely words, bird art and photographs, Bryn! Absolutely beautiful.
Your Common Gallinule is called a moorhen around here. They're lovely, with their insistent calls and their constantly flicking-up tails. They're on most ponds and lakes around here - quite shy, though. Their babies are adorable - tiny balls of black fluff with funny little faces!
A lovely post. I'm ever so behind on my reading, but having a super time catching up! 😊