THREE GREATEST SOUNDS IN OUR WORLD

It is said the three most enveloping sounds in our world are the sound of the seas, of the winds, and of silence.

The sounds of the sea can be as roaring as North Atlantic waves smashing into New England fishing fleets, as gentle as Pacific tides lapping into San Francisco harbors, or as lyrical as blue surf romancing white Caribbean beaches. Wherever, the power and pugnacity of the seas remind us there will always be something bigger than the biggest of us.

It is perhaps why the stories of so many great figures in history involve water: The Pharaohs, the Greeks, Jesus, Columbus, the Puritans. It is the recurring dynamic between man and the ocean from which we are said to have evolved.

Likewise, the sounds of the wind are out there. They can be either songful or frightful, but forever with us. They whisper strange and wonderful messages when slipping through night-time forests or dawn-time neighborhoods. In other times, they scream terrifying pronouncements when they whip up into tornadoes and typhoons. The most invisible and thus the most mysterious of sounds, the wind can either cool you on a hot summer night or horrify you in a spring thunderstorm.

Finally, the sounds of silence. Now these are pregnant with possibilities. They are what your soul can hear that you ears cannot. The sounds of silence are like this enormous black comforter floating down upon your busy body, holding you inside its gentle grip. A grip many today struggle to escape with the knife of noise. Noise and more noise. From screens large and small, from instruments carried and held, from whatever we can find to silence the sound we most dread. The silence of being alone with ourselves.

Would it be too fanciful to suggest that the loudest sounds of silence arrive whenever we do something really dangerous? Like lying on our back and looking up into the summer stars. All alone. All by our-self. The danger? That we might discover that, yes, we do have a soul that can hear the stars...