In the Beginning
In the beginning, I was a quietling.
Listening was effortless, and I could hear everything. Easiest to hear of all was a voice that started inside and came out in cries and babbles, and soon enough, words. A voice that was becoming me and making me, both.
And then, maybe five years in, things started to get noisy. I started to get noisy. It got harder to listen, and the voice I recognized as my own drifted.
The quiet came to feel so far away. I came to feel so far away.
After a while, maybe forty years or so, I could barely hold myself together in the noise anymore.
Like a bridge swaying and twisting in the wind, oscillating more and more violently, I finally let go and fell apart.
And then, in the middle of the disintegration and disorientation, a miracle. Everything became quiet again. The noise was still there, but it seemed distant now, more like an echo than an original. As it receded, I could hear myself again.
To my surprise, my voice sounded younger, and freer, than the forty-something me that had collapsed into the narrows. Eleven years old, at most. And it wasn’t crying, or babbling, or even speaking words; it was laughing.
I am, it recently occurred to me, becoming a quietling again.
The more I’ve listened, the more I’ve come to love and find my belonging in the quiet. The quiet before everything, outside of everything, beyond everything, deep underneath everything. The quiet before, inside of, beyond, and deep underneath me. Quiet places, creatures, people, things. Quietlings.
P.S. I’ve noticed in the last couple of years that I’ve been coming to appreciate* the noise, as well, after a fashion. Mostly to find out if the quiet might also precede and surround and transcend and be present beneath it, too. (*Is appreciate the right word? embrace, maybe? be curious about? yes, that, for sure…and maybe sometimes even love, in the sense of allowing it to be included in my circle of self.)