The soundtrack of our lives involves music, movies, television shows, cars, etc., but how would people feel if they didn't have all that - if they choose to go to a place where they don't hear the sounds of technology and all of its advancements but hear the sounds of nature. Kathleen Norris and Barry Lopez definitely experienced life with the human noise on mute. They experienced nature and fell in love with the beauty of it. This choice to experience nature and its untouched perfection led them to a place where each day they were astounded by the mere beauty of earth. They show people that if we take away human noise we can hear what the earth has to say; we can feel the enjoyment and pleasure each day brings us just by looking out of a window. The importance of this world doesn't involve malls and cars but it involves the wild natural places and why they are so vitally important. In Kathleen Norris's Essay "The Beautiful Places," she doesn't merely express a personal preference, but she makes an argument about the value of places like the Dakotas. She explains that silence is important because it gives our minds something to think about, it makes us listen to the birds singing and what a new day sounds like. It isn't the instruments and tools we use to make songs but the instruments of nature and the beautiful song it projects. The beauty of this world is measured by the "miraculous little things" (Norris 119). She moves to the house in South Dakota where her mother had grown up in and she also lived a few years of her childhood, Dakota was filled with beauty and a certain holiness that she found overwhelming. She goes on to explain the different things that bring her joy by living on the Plains. She doesn't need the sounds of technology she just needs nature and all its beauty outside of her window. She can leave if she wants and live in one of the many places she was raised but she doesn't want to, she relates to a monk Terrence Kardong, when it comes to how she feels about home and how she would feel if it was taken away, "If you take us somewhere else, we lose our character, our history-maybe our soul" (Norris 119). The relation to what the monk said and to her life is that the plains isn't just a place to her it's her life, she doesn't need flashy things like a monk doe