voice and silence

The voice, essential expression of self that it is, comes out of the center of the self. You have only to speak to feel the proof of this. So it makes sense that when you're in pain, or in recovery, or lost and wandering somewhere in the blue in-between distance, your voice wouldn't be so easily found, either. Right?

My voice has, apparently, been somewhat dislocated of late. The last two months' grief have seen it dwindle to, sometimes, just an echo of itself. It wants, often, to fade out like a mountain stream whose spring has dried up. That's only the feeling, and only sometimes. Of course its source isn't really gone. But the voice, often, is. So that people around me - even the people I know well - have been saying a lot lately, "Sorry? Could you repeat that?" And the hell of it, the even-deeper-drought of it, is that I can't tell it's happening. I can't tell that my voice is quieter, less than normal. Just like, maybe, a stream that flowed by your home everyday and was slowly drying up wouldn't appear smaller. Until suddenly it was disappearing.

But yesterday Life sent a little rainfall. In an unexpected form. I got invited to speak on the radio. One of the coordinators of the Peace and Justice Center passed me at my Winnings table, and asked if I could help her out. They record a weekly community calendar of justice-related events, and they use two voices alternating to give it some depth. The recording session was at one, and she hadn't found her second voice yet.

We meet at the KUNM studio on campus a few hours later. We have a room to ourselves for one hour. It's easy enough reading through two pages of announcements, in turn. Even my Spanish pronunciation, required for one event, comes out passable. The coordinator, who is from Ecuador, has a gorgeous accent and intonation both. I'm relieved that mine fits in. But even better, on the playback I hear almost no trace of the Texan twang that was there for so long. This in itself is a terrific gift...

Most of our studio time is spent editing the 2-4 minute spot. She shows me how to run the complex audio program, which looks like the readout of a lie-detector test or a heart monitor. We identify and cut out all superfluous pauses and audible in-breaths that would distract our hearers. The program's best feature, in my opinion, is an item on a pull-down menu called, "Generate Silence". At times it's a little too abrupt to just cut out a breath, which after all creates a natural pause that enables comprehension. So we use Generate Silence to add a sliver of pure quiet into the speech. A counter lets you measure the length of the quiet space, and just a tenth of a second is enough. I tell her I'd be so happy to have this function to use in regular conversation. She gets it right away, and laughs. All those people uncomfortable with silence (really with themselves), who might find as much relief as I would, at one free moment where no words were needed. All those who haven't learned the graceful rhythm of give-and-take that creates true communication: I'd paste into the ether between us just 1/10 second of nothing, and there would find the space that a non-interrupter like me needs, to have a voice. Of course, I'd never impose this silence on top of anyone's speech. Only insert it quietly, in the in-between. Just like in the program, there's always a place for a breath of spaciousness, if you magnify those frantic needles and spikes of sound closely enough.

And for sure I'd add it to my own inner conversations. That worrisome muttering that won't give itself a break: Generate Silence. The aching electricity of heart-mind-pain that keeps me awake at night? Add one minute of kind, unimposing Nothing, and surely acceptance and release of consciousness would be possible. Every memory of his beautiful smile or his generous enthusiasm or all those lovely lovely words that he took back in the end...Generate Silence. Oh yeah.

For the moment, though: I do in fact have a voice. One that's audible, clear, and useful for something. KUNM has recorded proof of this. It'll air sometime this afternoon. Maybe those soundwaves will even travel further out, from there - cause who knows, really, how these things work - carrying threads of my voice and my life, woven in with all the others. Generate Connection, in someplace or some inbetween that I haven't heard of yet.