I live in the Pacific
Northwest, and have all my 58 years. I teach in a local high school, and
get to share yoga as a PE elective. I have had a long standing focus for
yoga that it is quiet and without music, which is viewed at first by the students
as unfair and unheard of. Students at
first are frightened and surprised by how loud their personal thoughts are in
the silence of the yoga room, and then begin to crave the absence of
technology-driven distraction. I teach walking classes as a PE elective,
and the students are not allowed to listen to music and plug their ears with
earbuds or headphones (for ‘exercise’ motivation if you can imagine), nor even
have their phones with them (some drop the class because they are unable to do
this). We are located within the noise
pollution radius of the freeway, an expanding airport, and relentless increases
in coal/oil trains. We walk sidewalks
along streets with cars whizzing by, in close proximity to the hospital
helipad, and recently drones just overhead.
I do though get to observe students begin to recognize bird sounds from
chickadees, sparrows, juncos, hummingbirds, cedar waxwings, robins, seagulls,
crows, starlings, and then the local peregrine chatter and if really lucky eagle
cries from a hundred feet up as they circle toward the river. The students begin to discern the difference
between dog barks of ‘Hello, I’m here, can we play?’ and ‘Get away’. They start entertaining the idea they are no
longer invisible and recognize community members walking, biking, and jogging by
using eye contact and saying the word ‘hi’.
They have the opportunity to acquire listening and empathy skills as
they spend an hour with a walking partner who is conversing with them in close
contact. I love my job. The real reason I am writing, though, is that
over the years of indiscriminant development and significant paving of
farmland-open space-forested land in my beloved slice of heaven, there is a
slogan perpetuated by the local military base whose flights overhead have
stepped up significantly in the past ten years that this continuous low flying
military jet noise is the sound of freedom…and this includes the flights toward
the Olympic Peninsula, as well as over the San Juan Islands, toward Mt. Baker,
over a multitude of local lakes and streams, tiny communities, and wildlife of
all types. You may be able to tell I
would argue with this as we continue to raise generation after generation void
of connection with nature, quiet places and spaces, and opportunities for
silence.

So tempting a review to leave everything around and escape to the valleys, hills and oceans