There are silences so deep
John Luther Adams
you can hear
the journeys of the soul,
enormous footsteps
downward in a freezing earth.
A couple of days ago NPR ran a short portrait of composer John Luther Adams. I knew nothing about Adams. Aside from what they reported, most of which I’ve already forgotten, I still know nothing about Adams. They played some of his music and quoted from his memoir. It wasn’t the music and it wasn’t exactly the memoir that struck me but it was the notion that someone could live, create, and thrive in such deep solitude and remote wilderness. Adams spent much of his life, by choice, in Alaska. Adams went to Alaska in 1975 as an environmentalist. Of his arrival he says, “from the moment I arrived, I knew that I had come home.” The profile describes Adams’ life as being “in the north — truly in it, not in a city but living in the tundra moonscape or in the kind of scrubby pine forest he did — and experiencing its extremes of weather and landscape means getting acquainted with the sounds of never-really-silence.”
There are days when that type of life appeals to me – one of being able to walk out my door and in to the woods, alone. I imagine the quite warmth of the nightly fire, the smells of wood and earth and pine. I think of Kerouac atop the fire tower in Dharma Bums, or John Muir who would leave his family for days or weeks to disappear into the wilderness (though Muir’s behavior also strikes me as extremely selfish). I wonder if I could survive that type of a life – not so much the cold, but the solitude.
I dictated a note in my phone as I listened to the story: “living between…. it would be nice to be so definitive in knowing that you are a social person or a solitary person.” I sometimes contemplate this notion of solitude, the need or desire for alone time. At times, I’ve taken a firm stance in declaring it’s not necessary for me. At other times, I think I’ve been trying to figure out where I fit on the spectrum of strongly individualistic vs. whatever the opposite of that is… happily enmeshed with others? I keep telling myself I’m not afraid of being alone, sometimes I enjoy it, but it’s not my preferred state.
Here is a man, Adams, who immediately fell in love with being in the wild – he knew it was home for him. Are we all capable of, susceptible to, that type of a revelation? Do we become wired to seek out certain lifestyles? Do we have a preferred sense of home calling us somewhere? There are those people who love small-town life: church gatherings, wholesome neighbors, and PTO meetings. There are those people who love the hip urban scene: dinners out with friends, busy streets, drinks, museums, events. There are those like Adams who long to be miles away from another soul paying attention to the never-really-silence. And there’s a whole lot of in between. That was where my note to myself was heading. It would be nice to know which of those things held the greatest appeal for me. As part of a couple, a unit larger than myself, all seem possible and enjoyable. As a single person, slightly adrift, each of those lifestyles seems like they require a whole lot of attention and learning to see the beauty in the present moment. And when I think that way, I feel deficient. I begin to wonder why I would need the help of someone else to provide that definition – why it would seem easier with someone else, as if seeking validation.
As I’m writing this, the song “I’ve Been Dazed” by Michael Kiwanuka began playing.
I’ve been dazed
My pride is gone
My mistake
Guess I’ll move onLondon days
It’s cold outside
Lost my way
You know I’ve tried
Hearing this song, I immediately thought of the many days and many hours of walking along the Mississippi feeling both at home and a little lost. A person committed to moving on. A person unencumbered and learning to drift. Alone yet part of something bigger, a city, a river, a vibe. If there’s one thing that being alone teaches you, it’s how to think about being alone – or at least an awareness that you think about solitude vs. intimacy and the how and where of fitting in and if any of it even matters.
When I pulled up roots a year ago, I knew I was doing something that none of the people in my circle would understand. I’m not sure I understood it. If any of them had done it in their past, it was a long time ago and usually with the support of someone else. I think when one does that as a young person, it’s seen as striking out on one’s own. Doing it later in life, when most people are settled, kinda puts you at odds with the world. And not knowing your place, lacking definition when everyone else seems to have it, can be unsettling. Being able to fit in everywhere sometimes means not fitting in anywhere.
Yesterday, on an evening walk, I stood in front of a 200-year-old white oak. I thought about the simplicity of living 200 years in the same spot – not striving for anything else, knowing exactly your place. I thought about how much space this tree took up and how in order to survive that long it needed both space and roots. This morning, I came back to the story about Adams and his time in Alaska. I can’t imagine what that type of solitude does. I know when I quiet things down to those never-really-silent moments, a lot of human endeavor seems like a busy, noisy distraction. But the thing that strikes me the most as I’ve been writing this, the thing that prompted the note on my phone, was the certainty Adams felt that he had found home. I think that’s rare. It makes me uncomfortable to think that way – as though it somehow diminishes everything else. There’s a level of grace and gratitude in being able to find beauty and a sense of home in everything, but if you’ve ever had that feeling that Adams mentions – where it just feels more right than anything else, it sort of shakes you, leaves you a little dumbstruck as to who you are, what you’re doing here, and how to listen to those silences so deep.