Listen to the silence

The following is from my book House of the Earth. Have you ever had a time when it seemed like you could stop the chatter in your mind long enough to "tune in" to the silence? Alison Cabot never has ... yet. 

From her perch on the housetop, something caught Alison’s attention on the roof of a house across the plaza. A handful of men, bodies painted in wide black and white stripes, had climbed onto the rooftop. They wore loincloths, moccasins, and striped, two-horned hats over painted faces. Drunkenly, one of them almost walked off the edge of the roof before another man grabbed his arm and jerked him back. With much laughter from the crowd, they threw a rope over the edge and lowered each other to the ground where thay gawked about without seeming to notice the katsinas dancing in their long unbroken line. The clowns’ clumsy presence on the plaza served to emphasize more sharply the elegance of the katsinas’ graceful movements and intricate costumes.

Leaning close to Alison’s ear, Ben’s aunt, sitting on the blanket next to her, jutted her chin toward the clowns on the plaza. “Once the Hopi were like the clown people. We couldn’t even tell the spirits danced right beside us.”

She was quiet for a long time and Alison thought she’d finished speaking but followed the custom of remaining silent in case the other person had more to say.

After a bit Ben’s aunt leaned close again. “We had to learn to listen to the silence and then we could hear drums and see the spirits dance.”

Alison wondered about what the woman said the rest of the morning. What did “listen to the silence” mean exactly? If she could but see it, was there something bigger than herself that she was already a part of?