Especially the Truth and Beauty

I try to take some time each morning to sit outdoors as the sun rises. I tell people I do it because of the beauty. I assume they imagine I'm talking about the emerging colors of the sunrise. Indeed, for a long time that's what I thought as well. But I've come to realize that the true beauty of a morning outdoors as the sun rises is revealed not in seeing, but in listening.

The modern world is overwhelmed by human sounds. It's estimated that human-made sounds have doubled the background noise on 63 percent of the planet over the past couple centuries. There are very few accessible places where one can escape noise pollution. Even when we're able to "block out" the shush and rumble of traffic, jets, and trains, there remains those constant dings and rings, recorded music, the hum of furnaces, refrigerators, and florescent lights. And, of course, there's all the talking. "Sensory pollution," writes science journalist Ed Yong, "is the pollution of disconnection. It detaches us from the cosmos. It drowns out the stimuli that link animals to their surroundings and to each other."

When I sit outdoors and listen, once I've blocked out the human sounds, what I hear initially are the birds waking with the sunrise. There was a time when I'd turn my head in an effort to catch sight of this whistler or that warbler, but not so much any more. There is plenty of truth and beauty in those sounds alone. And on those occasions when I don't hear the birds, that lets me know that there is a hawk or owl or some other bird of prey nearby, listening along with me.

"Sounds," writes Marshall MacLuan, "are in a sense dynamic things, or at least are always indicators of dynamic things -- of movements, events, activities, for which man, when largely unprotected from the hazards of life in the bush or the veldt, must be ever on the alert." Listening to nature is a part of our evolutionary heritage that we are losing in our modern world.

There are rustlings in the shrubbery and my entire focus on what that might mean. It's probably just another bird, but it could be a lizard or squirrel or rodent. It could even be a raccoon or skunk. Or even . . . a larger animal. A coyote once dashed from my neighbor's hedge, carrying what looked like a rabbit in its teeth. Another time, a spied a bobcat watching me from a distance before slinking away, apparently spooked. It had made no detectable sound either coming or going, as quiet as the Great Horned Owl that passed over me one morning like a shadow. I imagine it's unusual for a bobcat, or any other animal for that matter, to witness a human sitting still and silent as the sun rises. We're more like the ravens -- noisy.

I suppose we modern, Western humans remain "ever on alert" even if it is for prey or predators. I mean that sound from my phone could mean that my baseball team has made some kind of announcement, or maybe a politician somewhere is wrong and the system is letting me, this an animal that is "ever on alert," know about it. The fact that the same ding notifies me of both a thumbs up to a text message as well as a death in the family is a narrowing of experience, one in which "seeing is believing" becomes our only greatest and only sensory truth.

It has taken me awhile to trust that hearing is believing as well. I find myself striving every morning to overcome my cultural training. Listening like this is makes me more aware of my other non-sight senses. I breathe more deeply. I think I'm starting to both smell and taste changes in the air around me. My body is always speaking to me, of course, but while listening, I'm starting to learn to hear the beauty and truth in my gut, joints, skin, and muscles. We are more than brains with eyes, after all.

We are bodies that have evolved with their own magnificent sensory umwelt, the word scientists use to when talking about the sensory experience of animals. Thought begins with sensory input. We evolved our a host of senses in order to survive and thrive, yet, it seems, we are increasingly, and perhaps dangerously, muting and deafening and blocking everything that isn't visual. It makes us stupider in that it leaves us unaware of so much. Especially the truth and beauty.

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