SONOROUS DESERT
What Deep Listening Taught Early Christian Monks—and What it Can Teach Us
Kim Haines-Eitzen • Princeton University Press
Most of us likely think of deserts as barren with no redeeming value. Not so for Kim Haines-Eitzen, who finds a rich soundscape there that promotes solitude. That gift of solitude, she says, explains why some of the earliest contemplative practitioners, the Desert Fathers, sought refuge there. Haines-Eitzen grew up in the Middle East and, from an early age, was taken with the power of the desert, both the simplicity of its landscape and the “sound of desert silence.”
When you sit quietly in a place with seemingly so little going on, you hear the sound of air and animal noises in a way that might escape notice when you’re in preoccupied mode. Haines-Eitzen points out that “we often forget to give sound the close attention it deserves… Sounds encircle us, reverberate within
