The Quiet Hum - After the noise

From Harvester of Sorrow to the quiet hum within — A meditation on noise, myth, and the human need to be heard.

We've built a world that thrives on noise.

Headlines, activism, markets, even faith, each claiming we’re at the center of everything. We preach and panic in equal measure, each of us convinced we’re a little holier than the next, another verse in the same restless song. Climate change has become one of our loudest stories. The science is real enough, but the human drama wrapped around it, the guilt, the grandiosity, the panic that we alone can ruin or redeem the Earth, keeps the frequency high.

“You lie so much you believe yourself.”

Metallica, “Holier Than Thou”

In the scale of galaxies we’re a flicker. The planet has frozen, burned, and remade itself long before us. Still, we talk as if its breath depends on ours. Maybe that’s the oldest human reflex, mistaking influence for control.

“Harvester of Sorrow.”

The sound of humanity at full volume, our need to scream the suffering out, to feel powerful in our own undoing.

And yet beneath that, even there, the hum remains. Between riffs and applause, between heartbeat and feedback, silence waiting patiently. You can hear it if you stop tuning into the broadcast, if you let the fan spin, the cars pass, your dog’s nails tap the floor, your kid’s tablet hum its little tune. None of it disappears. It just stops demanding to be drama.

Nature already knows this. The birds react when a shadow crosses the sky, then reset moments later. No panic, no story, just awareness and return. They don’t call it resilience or mindfulness. They simply live inside the pulse of what is.

Humans, though, keep telling stories to make the unknown easier to hold. Apex predators, chosen species, saviors of a planet that never asked for saving. The truth is simpler and harder. We’re dust that learned to speak, pretending our words can outlast the silence.

Some might hear this as uncaring, a kind of detachment. But it isn’t. It’s the kind of care that listens more than it speaks, the kind that trusts life to go on without our constant commentary.

The silence isn’t cruel. It’s honest. It asks nothing of us but attention.

Turn down the screeching noise inside, the one that insists the world’s chaos is your undoing. See that the storm lives in your own temple, and the noise outside becomes part of the same quiet hum.