This morning I was rummaging for a notebook when I happened upon an article previously mentioned in this blog. In the New York Times Magazine, March 18, 2012, Kim Tingley wrote in “The Whisper of the Wild” about a sound recording project in Denali National Park and Preserve. (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/18/magazine/is-silence-going-extinct.html?pagewanted=all)

This location, especially in winter,  is a vast and silent world. When there are no planes overhead, only the sounds of nature are heard– if only the sound of one’s own breath and heartbeat. Coming back from an expedition to install a recording station, and collect recording results, he described an experience he had at the recording site:

Night fell as we retraced our steps along the trail. The sky turned from lavender to indigo while the snow on the ground and the mountains glowed even when the last of the sun was gone. We headed for Jupiter, hanging low above the trees, and as we walked, I pictured the station back on the ridge, wrapped in the same darkness. When Betchkal harvests the audio, he will find us repacking our packs, exclaiming over our frozen apparatuses and sliding down the hillside into the willow field below. He will also, for three minutes, witness us still our movements and attune our ears to one of the quietest places left on Earth. In that window, I could hear the vastness of the valley — no sound marks materialized, like buoys bobbing on an empty ocean, to segment the sense of infinity. The landscape enveloped me, as Betchkal said it would, and I felt I was the landscape, where mountains and glaciers rose and shifted eons before the first heartbeats came to life.

“Standing in that place right there,” Betchkal told me later, “I had a complete sense that I was standing in that place right there and not drawn or distracted from it at all.”

There is a place close to the Blue Heron mining community ( http://www.nps.gov/biso/historyculture/blueheron.htm) in Kentucky, a short hike to the edge of a vast gorge. I love to go to this spot and absorb the silence. It feels like a healing balm. In this spot it is easy to become one with the landscape. It is as if the very silence sucks all of the thoughts from the mind.

However, Nature is everywhere. A weed pushes its way through a crack in a city sidewalk. It is easier to become one with the landscape in a wild place. Knowing that and craving that– I wish to become one with the landscape wherever I am.