Radio Silence

I rarely listen to radio anymore. Once it was as automatic in the morning to turn on a radio as it was to make coffee. At night, the radio would be the second to last thing I’d turn off, just before the bedside lamp. I needed the noise. The yabber-jabber word play of disc jockeys was as important to me as phone conversation, maybe more. Unlike the recorded “Press one to hear this important message about your credit card,” a DJ’s voice sounded human.

In recent years my media use has dwindled to almost nothing. I cancelled television because the only thing I ever watched was Cartoon Network. To sit by a television felt more and more like doing nothing. People react to this revelation as if I am making some kind of arrogant boast or statement—political, moral, obnoxious, or otherwise. But I’m not. I don’t watch TV because I truly don’t want to.

My losing interest in television was odd enough, I suppose, even to me, but then interest in newspapers, magazines, and now radio have dwindled as well. I dutifully check up on world events through the Internet, but something that once was as routine as breathing is now a chore, like laundry. I have to make myself check the news.

I wasn’t aware of the extent of the change until I attended a music festival yesterday. It’s the first I’d been surrounded by raw manufactured sound in a long time. It was great music, but a relief to get home. As my illness progresses I think I need more and more silence, or at least a different kind of noise. Instead of rock beats, it’s cicadas I need to hear. Instead of DJ’s, I crave goldfinch chatter. Instead of weather reports, I consult the thrum of passing dragonfly wings.

I do not understand the change. I simply need more silence now. My body is declining; I have come to trust the food cravings it sends me. They are accurate for helping me adjust my relentless imbalances. Maybe my craving for silence is the same, a path for righting an imbalance. A raccoon coughs in the night; a coyote yelps; a deer stamps its feet. I hear nature’s music and can sing myself, not with my voice, but with the beating of my heart. 


Above: Dragonfly, acrylic on tile, 12x12 inches. Copyright ptw 2006