Cosmic Hum

Coming back at night to the isolated house overlooking Arroyo Hondo, I stopped to listen to the silence. There was no sound, nothing to be heard, but I distinctly heard something beyond the sounds of my own body—a cosmic hum, very quiet, very large. Alfred said we were hearing the highway, just visible in the distance, headlights of one car, then another. I moved to put the house between us and the highway; there was nothing to the west, the sleeping valley, the Gorge of the Rio Grande. I still could hear the hum, the background sound of the universe in motion, coming from up in space.