How the pandemic brought serene sound into one couple's life

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I have lived most of my life in cities. I moved to Halifax in 2017 from Nairobi, the biggest city in my home country Kenya. Nairobi is a bustling metropolis of over 4.3 million inhabitants, alive with people, colours, motion and sound. Living there, I grew accustomed to a certain level of activity. Coming to Halifax after three decades of this was a bit of a mental shift. 

Here I was now among the neater, more organized streetscapes, with fewer people and colours that seemed muted. The sounds were new as well; the people sounded different, as did the traffic and construction noises. I came to realize that although Halifax was definitely more quiet than I was used to in Nairobi, the city never really seemed to go silent. Late at night, I would find myself listening for that never-ending, low-pitched rumble of the city.

Urban spaces have plenty of noise. We learn to ignore what we need to, or to live with it, in order to go about our daily business. Even so, I had started to become aware of a previously subconscious burden of noise, a quiet strain on my mind and soul. A yearning for silence and stillness often groaned at the back of my head, something I discovered that I found relief from by visiting nearby parks and trails, and taking long walks inside. There was solace to be found within nature, from what exactly I wasn't sure of until about a year ago, when I got the opportunity to explore this further.

Even before we moved to Halifax, my partner and I had extensively researched Nova Scotia, mainly through online resources. We had seen images and videos of the beautiful countryside and inevitably, we found ourselves exploring the property market, wondering if we ourselves might be able to own a slice of this rural beauty. Back home, land in the countryside is a coveted thing. Many Kenyans, even the ones who move to live in the city, still maintain their roots in the countryside; many have homesteads there where they grow some of their own food and even keep some domestic animals. We contemplated eventually recreating this little piece of home when we arrived in Canada. 

We took a big step closer to realizing this dream at the beginning of 2020, when we became the proud owners of a piece of land on the South Shore of Nova Scotia. I will never forget what stepping onto the property for the first time sounded like: the quiet, the perfect peacefulness of nature, the relief from the noise of the city. In the middle of 2020, and the pandemic that shaped it, my partner and I had an unexpected chance to spend some time on that land, and the Crown land that surrounds it. It was our first occasion to spend a prolonged period of time out there. Prior to this we had only made short day trips. However, since both our jobs had by then become COVID casualties, our land became a retreat, a place we could stay to regroup, to make plans for a future that was looking more and more uncertain by the day. 

Our days on the land unfolded slowly. We settled into simple routines. We were living off-the-grid in an old motorhome that we had purchased the previous fall and furnished with the bare essentials. A simple solar set-up provided our power, and for water we bought and filled two plastic totes. The days were peaceful, a strange thing given all the chaos that seemed to be going on in the outside world. The only sounds that would punctuate most of our days were the gentle sounds of nature— the wind, a few birds, the distant calls of an animal we didn't know. It was dawning on me that in the city, with all its noise, listening is sometimes so downright impossible that I had learned to mostly do without it. Here now, on the land, I was curious again, relearning the importance of listening. 

Modern city life tends to set us apart from it, but as human beings, we too are a part of nature. In that environment, it was easy to cultivate a deliberate awareness of myself within my natural surroundings, to really belong to nature and to tune into the beauty and mystery of this.

Nature will not compete with traffic or construction machines. It is too vast and beautiful for that. It demands that we first quiet ourselves, to be able to listen. I was learning that inside the stillness of nature, other voices start to come alive, voices that are not loud, but that are nonetheless present, beautiful, interesting and important. Voices such as my own inner voice. I could see how easy it is to ignore and forget these voices, and how they required me to still my mind in order to hear them better and listen more carefully. I was learning too that this was a place of unique peace, the kind that brings happiness.

Our time on the land came to a rather abrupt end when Nova Scotia began to re-open after the first wave of the pandemic had waned. We left our retreat a little reluctantly after we found new jobs in town. We moved and tried to readjust to city living. 

During our free days, we still go to the land often, to look after the various projects we started, and to undertake new ones. But mostly, we go back to listen.