"I like the quiet."

I like silence just fine.

For me, quiet is noticing which noises have stopped -- the HVAC fan, the refrigerator compressor, that damned mockingbird who likes to serenade at 2 a.m.

that damned mockingbird who likes to serenade at 2 a.m.

OH! You've reminded me of something I wrote at about age twenty, back when the earth was still cooling and glam rockers roamed the earth.

And on topic - this week's topic - no less!

My piano player once told me I couldn't be a poet unless I wrote an ode to a skylark.

So I did. Burned into my memory circuits, because he nearly choked to death laughing:

Harken, skylark in the tree
singing there so loud and free
singing as I mutter "Dirty
fucking bird, it's SEVEN THIRTY!
I did not get in 'til three!"

Harken, skylark in the tree
singing there so loud and free
singing loud as any sparrow
I will shoot you with my arrow
Then, perhaps, will silence be.

Hee!

I find that it really relates to my emotional state. If I'm agitated, or avoidy, silence drives me bonkers. I need a cd or the tv or something other than ambient noise, because my thoughts are unsettling.

When I'm relatively well balanced, and confident, silence is a companion.

Maybe there's the rub, as Bill Shakespeare said. It's a funhouse in here.ETA: But maybe I should see what I come up with looking for more positive quiet moments...just to see what floats up.

Also, with the big cathedrals - if I can be there when there aren't a bazillion tourists (I always go to Notre Dame and light a candle to celebrate the Liberation of Paris, when I'm there), I just bask in the quiet.

Our "chapel" at my college was big, and stone, and gothic, and I used to go hide in there sometimes when I'd had my fill of people. I always felt a twinge of guilt about it--I mean, it's not like I went in there to pray--but the silence was incredibly refreshing, yes. I love churches like that. (Westminster Cathedral was a great disappointment, I'm afraid. No silence there.)

Katie, do you mean the Abbey? Agreed. The atmosphere would be amazing, if it wasn't for the seven zillion chattering tourists every day.

Chartres, Rouen, Notre Dame, all have a sense of silence to them. Sacre Couer, alas, does not.

Oooh, silence. I love it so. I rarely turn on music, much less the TV, when I am home alone. I'm happy hearing the wind through the trees, and the soundtrack in my head. The soundtrack is a delightful phenomenon much different from the annoying earworm. I don't even know what all of it is or if I've ever heard it before. There's times when DH has been watching TV for hours on end, and I walk down the hallway into the bedroom and enter a blessed zone of peace, cool with the dappled light under the apricot tree, and oh, it's as if my cares unravel a notch or two right then and there.

I have a freeway near and am in a descent path for the Oakland Airport, and have become accustomed to pausing the Tivo until the roar of the plane passes and I can hear the TV again. I'm glad I no longer live right on Haight Street to be awakened by bar patrons at last call.

On edit: Deb, what about Grace Cathedral? It's not quite to medieval European scale, but it seemed lovely to me.

Katie, do you mean the Abbey? Agreed. The atmosphere would be amazing, if it wasn't for the seven zillion chattering tourists every day.

Whoops. Yes, I meant the Abbey. It was worse than London Tower, even.

Grace is very lovely indeed, in the old European tradition. Really, though, what I love about it is the labrynth. It's just pure quiet energy.