This is Your Brain on Silence

Mazinaw Lake Bon Echo Lookout -- photo Ruth Mundy

Our pastor gave us permission not to attend worship this morning. Well, our pastor is our son Isaac, and we kinda told him we wouldn't be there. He was gracious about it though.

The forecast called for a mix of sun and cloud and a high temperature of 16C, so we wanted to blow town with a canoe on the roof, which we did. We weren't sure if Bon Echo Provincial Park would still be open, but it was worth a try. It turns out that this is the last day of the season, so our timing was downright...Providential?

After an early start we were there by 9:30 and virtually alone at the boat launch, a hopeful portent. We traveled along the awe-inspiring cliffs of Mazinaw Lake, the headwaters of our Canadian Mississippi River which flows to the Ottawa. The water was calm so we were able to paddle close to the mystical pictographs, the red ochre paintings which Indigenous people created hundreds of years ago. Why did they choose these rock faces at water's edge for their creativity.

And it was as close to silent as we get in Southern Ontario. The water lapped against the rocks and echoed in the fissures here and there. We also climbed the cliffs along the park trail and looked out at the Fall colours bordering the upper and lower portions of the lake. 

Mazinaw Lake cliff -- photo Ruth Mundy

All this was holy for us, and not the least of it was the quiet. By the time we returned to our launch point it was active with many inept greenhorns heading out from shore (I'm unabashedly judgmental when it comes to paddling.) 

At the gas station on the way home a snarling Harley Davidson motorcycle pulled in behind me with radio blaring. In our court the leaf blowers and lawn mowers were united in the choir from hell. This my friends is civilization. 

The other day I read an article by Azriel Reshel with the title: Science Says Silence is Vital for Our Brains. In it he points to a WHO study which says that noise literally robs us of health:

In 2011, the World Health Organisation (WHO) examined and quantified its health burden in Europe. It concluded that the 340 million residents of Western Europe (about the population of the United States), were losing a million years of healthy life every year, due to noise. WHO also said that the root cause of 3,000 heart disease deaths was due to excessive noise.

Religions have always valued silence and solitude as a way of being attuned to God, although we seem to have forgotten this in our clamorous world. Worship would have been meaningful with our Christian community, I'm sure. I am glad, though, that we were far from the madding crowd for at least a few hours. Now, to hold on to the gift of silence in the week ahead. 

https://upliftconnect.com/science-says-silence-is-vital-for-our-brains/


Mazinaw Pictograph -- photo Ruth Mundy