Sound Observation 1 - Beach Bonfire

Sitting with friends around a bonfire at the beach in the night, I closed my eyes and listened. The flicker of the flames began to drown away in the relentless dull wash of the waves behind me, and even those gave way to the silence above; the stars were innumerable and radiant, and their existence was in the back of my mind, as they always are. Their silence watched us all, waiting. I brought my attention back to the world around me and first noticed the murmur of conversation from the groups of people down the beach and next to us, and those words clearly audible to me from close by. But again I felt a silence, rather than heard it; we human beings are commonly from relatively urban settings on campus, in the sense that we don’t live among plants and animals dominating the world around us. As we all gathered at the beach that night, we listened to one another and made our own sounds to fill the large empty silence of the beach in the late summer night.