If you make a quick on-line search about loneliness in America, you may be surprised that between twenty to thirty-three percent of the population feels lonely every week. There is a myriad of causes for this condition which I am not qualified to delve into as my sociological skills are suspect, but phrases like depression, political angst, feed-back bubble, frustration with technology, uncertainty, isolation, and others, are all thrown around with rabbit-hole parsing. I wouldn’t know where to begin knitting together all the nuance of psychiatric terminology. I have been living alone and thinking about … Continue reading Journal of Absence by Fred Wilbur →
If ‘silence is golden,’ why do we squander it so foolishly? If you try finding ‘peace and quiet’ in contemporary life, you will be gob-smacked to encounter it. We praise the sounds of nature: babbling brooks, whispering leaves, bird song. And granted, there are buzzing mosquitos and growling bears, but it has been shown that humans need the restorative powers of the outdoors. When nature takes a destructive turn, we anthropomorphize its “nasty: weather, “raging” floods or describe (the sound of) tornadoes as a fast approaching freight train. Which brings us to the notion … Continue reading The Dying Art of Silence? by Fred Wilbur →
Sara Maitland’s A Book of Silence. James Ragan’s Too Long a Solitude. Jane Brox’s Silence: A Social History. Thomas Merton’s Thoughts in Solitude… Is it just a coincidence, or did I subconsciously start reading books dealing with silence and solitude in the weeks before I planned to spend a few days alone in a friend’s rural cabin? And will the relative silence make my somewhat maladaptiveness to busy environs even worse? For I freely admit that living for thirty years in an area that borders on the rural, and spending so much of my time … Continue reading Silence & Solitude By Ann E. Michael →
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