“It is a pleasure to be with you for this day we are on earth together.”
~Libby Larsen

Yesterday I made a trek across Loring Park in Minneapolis to Westminster Presbyterian Church for their Town Hall Forum. The speaker was homegrown composer Libby Larsen. She began her talk with the words above. While I have admired much of her music over the years, with this one statement she won my heart. Indeed, wouldn’t it be a kinder, gentler world if we walked into each day, to the breakfast table, into our classroom or office and greet those we meet with these words? “It is a pleasure to be with you for this day we are on earth together.” Ahhhhh……..

As Larsen spoke on the subject of ‘a composer on composing’, we were able to glimpse the life of someone whose primary way of moving in the world is through hearing. As a primarily visual person, I am always interested in the other ways people access information, process it and then communicate with the world. As a composer Larsen spoke of hearing the rhythm in traffic, remarked on a sound she was hearing overhead at that moment, probably a vent of some kind, the rhythms she hears in the various languages people speak. All these contribute to the music she writes, her way of being ‘a person who hears their way into the world’, in her words.

It all made me want to be a better hear-er. I think I am a pretty good listener but perhaps not a very good hear-er. I can tune out other conversations around me, work with music playing or even the television and not pay a bit of attention to the sounds around me. What is it like to be aware of all the sounds that make up our daily life?

Larsen says “We haven’t heard a world like we are hearing now.” I suppose that is true. I just have never thought about it….or listened for it. More than the sounds of today I am most often jarred out of my tuned out state by sounds that connect me with a distant memory. The sound of a train’s horn moving along the St.Paul bluffs connects me with the warm, summer nights of my childhood when the train would move through our town signaling its journey from one place to another. The impact of ball to bat, the cracking that sends me back in time to the freedom of summer leisure. A song heard on the radio that conjures a tug in my chest of melancholy and adolescent angst. An old hymn that reminds me of the warmth of leaning into my mother’s soft, fleshy arm during church.

What is the world we are hearing now? I suppose there are more sounds of machines and equipment and the clicking and clacking of all the many devices we ‘need’ to make our 21st century work. There is also the tapping of fingers on keyboards, the beeps of cellphones and alerts to do this or that. The sound of more planes taking off and landing, cars of varying revs and vrooms. And all of it happening at once in a way that it has not always done, creating a sense of chaos for some and comfort for others.

Perhaps the sound that is in this world we are inhabiting right now that is in shortest supply is silence. Not silence as the absence of sound but the actual sound of silence. And silence is a sound, isn’t it? Again Larsen remarked: “Silence in our culture is the rarest of all words.”
When this brilliant woman made this statement, I thought of all the people throughout time who have pursued the sound of silence, this rarest of all words. I thought of the places I have visited, holy, ancient places, where silence was pursued by the great and the humble. I thought of the places in this postmodern world I am blessed to inhabit where the rare word of silence is also found.

For a moment I felt the gift of that silence wash over me like a prayer.Though I will endeavor to be a better hear-er for its gifts to stretch my visual world,the pursuit of the rare word of silence seems equally as important.