How long has it been since you’ve experienced a moment of genuine healthful silence, a time during which you were profoundly, silently, reverently alone with yourself, or with Nature, or with another (your soulmate, perhaps), or with your God? Such rich moments are possible when you are watching, watching beyond motive, beyond any demand—just watching. When you see the beauty of a lone tree in the field, a single star in the void, when you watch your soulmate, or your internal self—or speak to your god—silence is something that comes naturally. When you maintain a great silence and space, something can bloom in that watching. In that alertness there is something beyond words, beyond all measure. You may even touch the Divine.

Most people seem to fear the quiet. Macrina Wiederkehr wrote: “The world is afraid of silence. Radios blare. Televisions are never turned off. The stereo is on at top volume. The voice speaks whether or not it has something to say.” Whether the brain is engaged or not. iPhones rule the days. John Daniel Barry observed that, “Few people can endure silence for long. They must have some expression that corresponds to the unrest of the spirit.” If silence borders on nothingness, as usually envisioned, why the fear? Is the fear of one’s own thoughts the root of discomfort?

Possessing a streak of the introvert, I consider silence to be a supportive sibling, and an aid to watching. I would like to share one of my most memorable moments of true silence. The story begins on Sunday, Aug. 20, 2017. I had spent the day locating a spot (some 35 miles NW of Beatrice, Neb.) from which to observe the total lunar eclipse of the sun scheduled for between 10:50 and 10:55 (in SE Nebraska) the next morning. My spot (less than a mile from the center of the band of totality) was the small parking lot that served the boat ramp of Swan Lake, the centerpiece of the Swan Lake State Game Refuge. The next morning, I would have 2 minutes and 54 seconds of eclipse darkness totality, enough time to observe the side effects I most wanted to see: coolness, darkness, quietness of wild creatures, and the diamond ring. 

Monday morning revealed a broken sky, with dark, heavy clouds. Were we, for eclipse viewing, going to have a Russian roulette sort of morning? As it turned out, the sky was good to us. By late-morning show time, six other drivers had found the parking lot, and both sun and moon were in view and closing fast. As the moon began cutting across in front of our star, a deepening mid-day dusk shadowed the cooling air. Voices indicated an increasing excitement among  humans present. Red-winged black birds and marsh wrens, usually busy in and around the beds of cattails surrounding the lake, were becoming less active. The number of bank swallows slicing air in pursuit of insects was decreasing. Soon there were none. No one spoke, there was no traffic noise, and no breeze rustled plant branches and leaves.

When the moon snapped shut that last rim of sun, a sharp drop in visibility occurred; I could not read a license plate 30 feet away. The air very quickly became much cooler. The sun’s corona glowed full around, and a deep spiritual quiet settled over both land and people. Our period of totality gave sufficient time for me to absorb a good dose of humility. 

As the spheres moved on — the sun’s corona still in view, an arc of sun rim flashed free from behind the moon’s trailing edge, giving us a beautiful, but ephemeral diamond ring. While the moon moved to uncover the sun, the insight arose that I had not the slightest measure of control over any of what I was experiencing. 

Yet, there was something else: It was as if the celestial bodies had sucked all motion, all vibration from the scene. I sensed an ethereal quietness so deep that the atmosphere — in my mind’s eye — seemed to have a texture, a series of great transparent mound-like waves. I imagined them as drumheads ready to be struck to send out even more intense sounds of silence. It seemed a quietness with a sense of force, a pressure, an expectation in the face of aloneness, an emptiness ripe with the possibility for communion with yourself, with another, perhaps even with the powers of the Universe. 

My brain seemed strangely roiled, primed to spring into action. Then came the realization what that diamond ring stood for us. For each of the countless thousands of us who watched the shadow of that ephemeral celestial union racing eastward across our great and troubled land. For each of us, during our own period of darkness, as we symbolically joined hands and hearts to share a moment of wonderment.

Both sun and moon then sailed silently on, back to what they do so well, day-after-day, year-after-year, millennium after millennium. At the time of our leaving, no person broke the spell; no pleasantries were exchanged. Each viewer simply got into the appropriate vehicle and quietly drove away. I guess that is what one does after an encounter with real power.