Silence renews wonder at the world. With sound damped, eyes can see more clearly, hands and bodies can touch and be touched more meaningfully. Food and aromas can be savored more fully. In stillness grass and trees and flowers, the sea and the land, and birds and animals more fully manifest their presence in our shared world. Physical silence forces us to remove the barriers of noise and face God unwalled by chatter and machineried sounds.
Snow offers an acoustical blanket.
Out on the winter trail by sled there were often long silences, broken only occasionally by natural or artificial sounds. Even the sounds of speech were well-framed by silence. The silent arrival of caribou in an otherwise empty landscape. . . The long wait at a seal hole for prey to surface. Waiting for a lead to close.