Yesterday afternoon I drove home after five nights at a silent retreat. No television, no WiFi.

When I say silent, I mean S-I-L-E-N-T. So silent I’m now practically screaming the word at you.

I have never been anywhere so dedicated to quiet, and I was nervous going in. I come from the land of decibels and chaos. So many people talking at once it would take an MIT physicist to sort out all those particles of string holding us together so loudly.

Even if a lot of that noise is in my own mind these days.

I thought it might take a couple of days for me to adjust and reap the benefits I hoped to find. Wrong. I got there within the hour of my arrival.

First, and really only, rule of the place: Silence Please. That’s what the sign said when I drove in. And the little notebook that welcomed me said it also, in even more specific terms: no cell phone use outside your domicile, and no human-to-human conversations out there, either. Just nod and smile, and move on.

At first that felt rude. Then, it was liberating. And thought provoking in the best sort of way.

Did I have any life altering realizations that are going to put me on the Dalai Lama road map to perpetual fame? No.

But I did take the time to see just how much the trees leaf out in a five day span if you’re looking out the exact same window for enough minutes of those days.

I heard, really heard, birdsong for the first time in years. What a wonderful thing birdsong is. How about birds in general?

And tree limbs, arcing and curving and bending their way into the sky.

Or just the singular sky, for that matter?

In the middle of all this silence and birdwatching and thinking about life, I realized that some of the happiest faces I have seen lately have been those of the astronauts and the folks in the control room who powered them out there into the cosmic wild.

Pure joy, from so many collective dreams come true. So much hard work realized in the best sort of way.

Easter Sunday I sat between two people rather vociferously and opposedly talking about the war while I had my phone pressed to one ear and my other hand stuffing the other so I could hear astronaut Victor Glover share his message of unity and hope from so far away my brain can’t even comprehend it. Even in the midst of the noise I could hear him, mainly because I needed to hear it.

It was like the universe calling out from the far reaches of darkness,  “Hey, silence please. Pay attention for a freaking second. You guys have got it all wrong. Just love each other. It ain’t that hard.”

And we’re all down here scurrying around, in our blessed ray of sun, acting like we’ve got it all figured out. We don’t. I’m not sure our brains were formed with the capacity to really ever figure it all out, and maybe that’s part of the gift, too.

Life is serious business. It sure is. For every single human soul engaged in it.

But it’s gorgeous and funny and wonderful, too.

Sometimes it’s a foal born at 3:00 in the morning and your daughter accidentally butt dials you, and you wake up to a missed call and you’re terrified because you think it’s an emergency, but really it’s just the awesome news that she’s been over there helping that mama and her mama’s number is still pulled up in her phone.

So you can’t go back to sleep but you do get to think about all the good stuff in the middle of the night, and be grateful for the ray of sun, for the birds, even, on most days, for the noise.