Listen to the Quiet

There is a light rain falling on this late summer Saturday. Refreshingly cool, damp, and quiet. I strolled through my garden path, stooping to lift a pepper plant that had fallen to the ground. Laden with jalapenos and rain -- it was too much for the stake to hold. As I gently pulled the stem upright and repositioned the stake into the wet earth, I could faintly hear the chattering of raindrops on the leaves of my oak trees above me. Soft. Unpolluted. And quiet.

It is good to listen to the quiet, I think to myself.

It seems to me that people have forgotten what quiet is. Our world is a world of noise. And when it is quiet, we have conditioned ourselves to fill the quiet with sound. We are uncomfortable with quiet. 

I believe my deafness has restored my friendship with the quiet. It has made me appreciate the smallest sounds that I overlooked before -- or took for granted -- in my attempts to fill the void of quiet with sound. And this bionic ear inside my head is an amazing tool for hearing the quiet.

If you haven't listened to the quiet in a while, maybe you should. There is so much to hear there.