Being as religious as I am, I couldn’t help but take a very spiritual perspective this weekend as I traveled through some of Utah’s finest national parks. I heard the voice of God.
No, God didn’t come down and talk to me in a booming baritone voice or in the form of a burning bush. I didn’t even here it as a thought in my head during a time of silent prayer. I’ve discovered that the voice of God is around us, but the world obscures it. The voice of God, in this case, is silence.
While walking through Arches National Park near Moab, Utah, I was captivated by the silence that surrounded me, especially in a park that holds one of Utah’s most famous natural landmarks, Delicate Arch. What made this so amazing was that there were literally dozens of people in the general vicinity of where I was, but I heard nothing except the wind blowing between the rocks and whistling through the trees.
Groups of people would pass by, people that I would normally expect to be ‘boisterous’, but instead they would pass in silence. Here is a place where God’s greatest creations in the Western United States are greeted with a certain reverence that I’ve scarcely found elsewhere. Not only am I greeted with the beauty of the natural world, I am also greeted with one of the most sacred principles that has been lost on modern society: the power of silence.
True, pure silence not only gives me this overwhelming sense of something much larger out there, but when I immerse myself in it, I’m able to get in touch with my inner self; to transcend the world around me and ponder the true meaning of life and where I fit in the whole scheme of things.
“Not merely an absence of noise, Real Silence begins when a reasonable being withdraws from the noise in order to find peace and order in his inner sanctuary.”
-Peter Minard
I guess it’s true what they say; silence is golden.
*I will upload select pictures from my current trek across the American West on my return home.