Lourdes Grotto - August 29, 2001

Lourdes Grotto - August 29, 10 am

The summer is nearing the end. The last of the regular Sunday masses is over, but the benches are still in place. Signs say there will be a large mass here on September 10. Then, it will be time to pack up for the winter.

The grotto is quiet today. No workers, no construction. Traffic is almost absent except for an occasional car.

I wasn't planning to record or write today. I felt the need to just "be". That's because sometimes the act of recording and writing can cause us to block out some of the sounds we might otherwise hear. A couple of things changed my mind and convinced me that this should be more of an active listening day.

An amazing thing happened - I looked up in a tree very close to me - about six feet away and directly in my line of sight was a magnificent hawk. Hawks are a very powerful sign in my life - when one appears, it is always a sign that I should look and listen more intently than usual.

I watched the hawk for 10 minutes or more. And in doing so, felt my listening getting sharper. The hawk flew to a corner or the grotto and perched on the fence. I followed it and found myself in the middle of an amazing dialogue between cicadas and a lawnmower (they seem to hum louder when they are competing with some other constant sound).

I went to get my mike from the car, and when I came back they had quieted right down. The lawnmower had too. Eventually, they returned and I was able to get the full chorus. The crescendos and decrescendos are very musical. They fade in, crescendo, then fade .. each crescendo can take as long as five minutes to build. I am grateful to the hawk for having led me to the place where the cicadas sang the loudest. Cicadas are so common to the August Ottawa soundscape that I might not have noticed. The most familiar sounds are often the ones we hear the least clearly.

The cicadas seem to fade when the wind blows or the sky clouds over, crescendo when the sun is at its brightest. In the middle of groves of trees is where there are the loudest. Naturally because they are tree dwellers.

They come and go in clouds of sound. It is glorious.

This summer's sound exploration of the Grotto is almost over. I will not be returning here many more times. It's the end of August ... I am thinking of the end of another season, hearing ahead to winter. I am imagining what the Grotto will sound like when when the winter winds howl, when car tires spin on streets iced with freezing rain, when only the occasional crow, hawk or jay screeches in the distance.

Another time. Another spirit in a soundscape transformed.

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