“In a world of noise, confusion, and conflict, it is necessary that there be places of silence, inner discipline, and peace. In such places, love can blossom.” – Thomas Merton.

Historians and sociologists believe that contemporary Americans live in the noisiest, most intrusive, angriest, and most stressful peacetime society in the world’s history.

I was startled to hear that, but I only had to think about it for a minute to know it was true.

Social media, the Internet, advertising, e-mail, pods and, frustration, argument, stress, grievance, conspiracy, lies,  money,  rage, technology, and screens rarely bring us peace, solitude, or silence between political conflict, social media,  stress, and screens.

In 2000, when I came up to a nearby mountain and bought a cabin, I was mostly alone for nearly a year with my two Yellow Labs, Julius and Stanley.

It was the first time in my life that I was living alone, in solitude and silence, and it was among the most precious times in my life. I began to learn who I was and who I wasn’t.

It wasn’t pretty. It was necessary.

The world of men has forgotten the joys of silence, wrote Merton, the peace of solitude, which is necessary to some extent, for the fulness of human living.

Man cannot be happy for long unless he is in contact with the springs of spiritual life, hidden in the depths of his own soul. If man is exiled constantly from his own home, locked out of his spiritual solitude, he ceases to be a true person.

I believe this is what happened to me. In silence, I began to think for the first time, to begin the journey towards becoming a true person, a journey still underway.

In the past few years, the noise over my head and my silence have only gotten louder. More internet, more devices, more hatred, conspiracy, violent argument, more division, rage, and grievance. It roars over us like a jet plane; it pours into our heads and consciousness.

I am learning to live below the noise, to find my solitude wherever I am, whatever is happening.

When I hear or see the noise, or it washes over me uninvited and unwelcome in my life, I descend, I go below it, I surround myself in a cloud of silence and inward feeling and reflection.

All-day long, messages out of control, messages I didn’t ask for, don’t wish to receive, don’t have time to read. A Niagara Falls of noise, literal and digital.

I can’t live in it and survive and become a true person in the noise. I have to find the silence or make it.

Merton taught me that when I am liberated by silence, when I am no longer involved in the measurement of life but the living of it, I can discover a form of prayer, a personal kind of prayer, in which there is no distraction.

That’s what living below the noise is for me, a prayer.

My whole life becomes a prayer; my whole silence is full of prayer; the world of silence in which I am immersed leads me to my true self and contributes to my prayer.

“The Silence of the spheres is the music of a wedding feast,” wrote Merton. “The more we persist in misunderstanding the phenomena of life, the more we analyze them out into strange finalities and complex purposes of our own, the more we involve ourselves in sadness. But it does not matter much because no despair of ours can alter the reality of things or stain the joy of the cosmic dance which is always there.”