The world is a noisy place and it is hard to tune out the orchestra of modern life. So I seek quiet places. I returned to one such place over the holiday weekend, at a resort in West Virginia. The resort itself is noisy and chaotic as resorts often are. But it is surrounded by a state park, and early each morning before the revelers stirred and just as the sun was about to wink above the hill, I took a hike out to a quiet place on the far side of the lake. There, I could stand for fifteen or twenty minutes listening to a layer of the world beneath our civilization. Birds sang, insects chittered, the breeze stirred the grass, but even the lake was quiet.
Those twenty minutes of quiet recharge me more than any other meditation, more than a good night's sleep, more than a holiday weekend at a resort. Sometimes, when I need a quiet place, I'll imagine standing in the midst of the Great Plains a thousand years ago, with nothing but the sound of the wind in the grass. The brief time at the lakeside was as close as I had come to that fantasy of a quiet place.
