All these words, like so many seemingly directionless birds, filling the air, flying home.

I worked as a DJ for a while, mostly, I think, because the station I worked at needed someone to fill a slot in time, and I was a warm body who liked to talk sometimes.

We had a term that we used when something happened and there was a moment of silence that traveled out over the radio waves.

We called that “dead air”.

Dead air.

That’s kind of strange.

Silence doesn’t make me uncomfortable, usually, but “dead air” wasn’t something that we liked to hear.

We didn’t want to hear the silence when we were working at the radio station.

That’s a funny thing when silence is the aberration.

I was thinking about conversation, and how I must sometimes think that it’s a strange kindness to fill in the holes and pauses with some kind of noise, maybe only to avoid the “dead air”.

I’ll run over the next thought that a person is going to express if the words don’t come fast enough.

Sometimes, I’m not a good listener.

All for the sake of avoiding “dead air”.

I stood in a canyon once with Jenny and some of her family, on a high desert plateau, ringed by mountains, and the silence there was so profound that it made me dizzy.

I thought that I would fall down.

I felt like crying.

It was so beautiful.

Maybe, Heaven is a place where you never feel like you have to fill in the holes, where you are content and never worried, where you are embraced by….and embrace….the silence?

I don’t know what Heaven is, but I think that part of it must be the quiet.

The sky is cloudless and the stars are where they always are….and it’s quiet here when I tilt my head to look up at them, standing on our front lawn.

It’s a good place to be….listening on the dark side of this big spinning ball….looking at these stars.

 

Plains (Eastern Montana Blues)   -George Winston