Bathed in Silence and Solitude

I live in the upstairs apartment of a two-family flat. I love the place. It is directly across from the Missouri Botanical Garden, so there are no houses across the street from us. The entire block is beautifully lined with grand oak trees, sycamores, Japanese maples and a variety of evergreen trees. In my living room French-doors lead onto a small balcony above the front porch. Sometimes in good weather I like to sit out there for a few moments late at night just soaking in the quiet and the darkness before getting ready for bed.

It is a sturdy old brick building, built in the 1920's. I've outlasted two previous tenants in the downstairs apartment. I never heard a sound from either of them. But the current one . . . well, I seem to hear just about everything she does! Her music blares till all hours of the night; she cannot seem to close a door without slamming it; her cell phone conversations reverberate all up and down the basement stairway - I think she talks there because the music is too loud in her apartment. Every time I have confronted her, she has been very apologetic and responsive, but then it happens again a few days later. I recently learned that she is moving out in the next few days, and I can't wait.

I work at a very busy place. I truly enjoy the people I work with. In fact, I actually look forward to going to work each morning. I am not a morning person (not at all!), but it has become easy for me to get out from under those covers because of the folks I will be spending my time with. Yet when the workday is over and I return home, I really look forward to the peacefulness I find among the forested gardens of the neighborhood. Perhaps it's like a getaway, or a small retreat experience. It feels very much like the description a monk once made about his journey toward an isolated locale in Asia:

"Our small boat nosed its way through the bewildering succession of lakes of northern Saimaa. The farther we moved to the northeast, the wilder and emptier the country became. Tall and silent forests lined the shores of the lakes through which we were passing. Hardly any dwellings or fields were to be seen. The region is all forest, bathed in silence and solitude."
I feel like I'm going into a trance just reading that.

M. Basil Pennington is a modern-day monk. He died earlier this year from injuries received in a car accident. He wrote a lot about prayer (as you would expect from a monk, after all) and he travelled throughout the world giving lectures and teaching methods of prayer. In his book, A Place Apart: Monastic Prayer and Practice for Everyone, (Liguori Publications) Pennington says:

"One does not have to go to the heights or depths to find a place apart. . .That is the important thing, the sense of apartness. The heavenly voice said to Arsenius, the praying courtier, 'Flee, be silent, . . .' And the palace favorite made his first step toward becoming a desert father. If one note is to characterize the true monk, it is this: He is the one who has gone apart, to be in some way alone. . . gone to find silence. . ."

I know that I get recharged in silence, and that can be found only when one is apart from others. Perhaps my apartment is just that: an "apart"-ment. So when noise from downstairs interrupts the silence I seek there, it disturbs not only my peace, but it throws off my sense of well-bing and even my feelings of security. For where else can I "flee" if I cannot have what I need in my own dwelling?