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The silent music Listen to the melodious resonance of nature

“First of all you must use your ears to take some of the burden from your eyes.” Don Juan tells Carlos Castaneda in A Separate Reality authored by the latter. After two months of practice in listening to the sounds of the world, Castaneda observed: “Don Juan warned me against closing my eyes. I began to listen and I could distinguish the whistling of birds, the wind rustling the leaves, the buzzing of insects…I was immersed in a strange world of sound…together they created a most extraordinary order.”

Intangible but tangibly felt rhythm play out in the world: the hum of computers in offices, the whine of rickety fans, the clank of metallic instruments, the beeps of cell phones, the shrieks of children, and the screech of vehicles.

The blaring speakers, the whirr of machines and the cadences of steps of school children coming out of prayer also form the daily buzz.

For Arvind, a man with abiding interest in education of children and whose fascination for sounds of nature is easier to admire than to explain, a contemplative walk in wilderness where nature is at her best, gives a supreme joy. “I generally go where I can listen to the nature. The sounds of nature fascinate me. I hear a music in the gentle breeze, in sounds of crickets and even in falling leaves,” he says adding, “I feel connected to my roots. A burbling stream gives me an immense feeling of flow.” His sense of hearing gets so acute at times that he can identify a splash in the pond so far away.

In the sublime architecture of sound, you may find your own voice. Harsha, a student, is a hank of sounds. He sloshes into the room, squishes and lazes on the sofa, bobs and heaves himself across the hall, crashes about all over the place and then ricochets off in different directions. Sulochana is a whistle of sound. She lurks outside the room, slithers, slides, seeps into it, creating a silent track that whispers to you.

Sounds, however sturdy or fragile, impinge on our consciousness. When you are clued into the sounds of nature, it can open up an intriguing inlet into the psyche. Rambabu is an amateur ornithologist and has always been a lover soft-muffled sound. “I like the way the circuits of computer squelch and tamp away when you switch off. Listen to the skitter of squirrel,” he continues: “It merges in the complex architecture of sound of the tree.” And that, in turn, merges in the sounds of the whole world in an interminable interdependence.”

It is in these moments of serendipity, time, for all its military progression from one point to the other, stops in its tracks in a subversive snap out of linearity, pirouettes, loops back and hangs in animated suspension.

But nothing matches the immediacy of lub-dub of the heart. Nothing as reassuring while it lasts.

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