Excerpt #1

In honor of the five year anniversary of when I shaved my head, here's a taste of one of the papers I wrote for a music class while studying abroad:

Where's the "Ma"?

Silence. A moment of silence. Tears stream down my face. It is September 11th, 2003, the two year anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the U.S. And I'm sitting in Japan, a country of my ancestors, a country we gruesomely attacked sixty years ago, killing my own ancestors, having a moment of silence for the victims of the U.S. terrorist attacks. I'm blown away. Japan, so forgiving of our sins, as Hiroshima clearly shows. Japan had a deadly earthquake only eight years ago, killing thousands. Do I remember? Do I even remember the date it happened? Did I have a moment of silence for all that they had lost? Of course not. Yet here we are, in a moment of silence—for us, in their country. Tears stream down my face.

Silence can be very profound and intense. In India, we were somewhat mobbed (at least it felt like it) every day by children and adults begging for food. Eventually, we pretty much learned to ignore them. Yet there were always the ones who tugged at our heart strings—maybe the very young children in tattered rags, maybe the old crippled and invalid. For me, it was those who never said a word. Tap tap [turn around]. Hand to mouth, hand to mouth. Silence. Turn back around. Tap tap. Ignore them, just ignore them. Silence. Deafening silence. Good, they're gone. So many things communicated, never a word spoken.

Silence can be a very powerful tool. We use it to honor, we use it to relax, we even use it to create tension. Silence can be found in music as well as everyday life: those two or three seconds between tracks on a CD; those awkward moments of the phone or on a first date when nothing is said; the sound of nothing you fall asleep to. Yet if you think about it, is there ever really complete silence? When you turn off the radio, you can still hear the hum of electricity. When everyone else is asleep, you can still hear the creaking of the ship as it rolls from side to side. There's always the sound of the other person breathing on the other end of the telephone, even when neither of you is talking. Silences can be both useful and disturbing. . .