Unfortunately I didn’t see “The Big Silence,” a documentary about five people on a week-long silent retreat, which aired on BCC Two last fall. Serena Davis’ piece about it has a nice description of the challenges of spending time in the company of others without communicating, and the benefits:

Living in silence takes away the surface distractions of life so that, paradoxically, you become much more aware of what is going on. The primary focus of this awareness is internal, in terms of your state of mind, but you also start to take in your surroundings better. As they do for the volunteers in The Big Silence, walks in the countryside, for example, became an incredibly pleasurable experience for me on my retreats as, seemingly for the first time, I took in the detail of the wildlife around me. Normally, worrying about the present or the future means we are impervious to the present, right down to the trees and flowers around us, which on a sunny afternoon in the British countryside can bring a delight all of their own.

The BBC iPlayer doesn’t work in the U.S., but fortunately you can watch the three episodes on Top Documentary Films, though. (The popunders are not very contemplative.)

The documentary’s organizer, Father Christopher Jamison, was the center of an earlier documentary, The Monastery, about a month in Worth Abbey. His book Finding Sanctuary is really great (this excerpt about silence gives a good sense of his writing).