The Hummingbird and the Girl with a Heart of Silence

There once was a little girl who loved to sit in a tree in her backyard. There, she would hum with the flies and the bumblebees. She would even hum with the traffic and the motorcycle that drove by every evening just before her mother called her in for dinner. She sat in her tree every day after school and hummed. She did this until one day, right around her 9th birthday, the humming around her stopped. She could not hear one single humming sound. She listened very carefully, but it was so quiet, she thought the world had come to an end. No traffic, no bees, not even the birds were making a sound.

She was so frightened, that she jumped out of her tree and ran inside the house. She never again returned to the tree, even though the world was again humming by 5 p.m. when the motorcycle drove by. Her mother and friends thought something terrible would happen, but the girl did not speak of it. She was sullen for days. Soon, however, she became involved in after school activities and neighborhood games, and she forgot all about the tree, and the humming, and the awful silence. And one day, she left home and moved to a much larger house of her own, in a town far away.

One afternoon, however, sitting on her screened-in porch, in her large house in her large town, she again found that the world had become entirely silent. No cars were driving by, no airplanes overhead, no humming of the refrigerator. She at first was alarmed. She stood up in a panic, and then sat down again. How silly! She was an adult now! But she remembered the tree and felt a fluttery sensation in her gut. Why had she been so afraid? Why was she afraid now?

Just then, a humming bird appeared at her porch screen, with a great, gentle humming sound in its wings. It poked at the screen, as though trying to get in. "Please," the woman said to the bird. "Go away." But the bird didn't go away. The woman sat and watched the bird, wondering what it wanted. And then, in that space of watching and wondering, a space opened in the woman's heart. And in that space was all of the silence of the universe. The silence that lived before the universe was born, and all of the silence that would remain once the universe was gone. The silence was so enormous and so profound, that the woman feared that she would be overtaken by it. That if she let herself fully understand the purpose of this immense space, that she would lose her mind.

She understood, then, why it had scared her as a child. She wondered if she should be afraid now, or if she could just relax into the space and let herself rest there.

She tried resting in it, and could do so for about thrity seconds, and then all of the noise of her life came rushing in. She tried relaxing again, but her body grew tense and tired for all of the trying. Then she had an idea.

She would hum.

So she pressed her lips together, ever so gently, and began to hum. She hummed until her refrigerator came on and it hummed with her, and an airplane passed overhead and hummed quite loudly. The hummingbird, which had been flitting back and forth along the screen, made one more fluttering attempt to enter through the screen, then disappeared.

The woman, astonished, bowed to the hummingbird, and then, without thinking, bowed inwardly to the child that she was, who had such wisdom as to hum along with the universe. For it is out of the silence of the heart that sound is spun, like the delicate beating of hummingbird wings.