To listen to silence is a very rare gift these days. We are surrounded by so much noise we cannot hear the silence behind everything. A child can hear silence, can listen to the song of the world as it turns and the song of the birds.
A house on a hill. A garden with a pool in it with three huge old fish, two gold and one silver. A child climbing over the wall, silently, cautiously, he had heard too many tales about this house in the past,
To sit on a hill where there is no noise except birds and wind and crickets is to listen to the world as it was in the beginning when we were not here, when there were no humans, it is timeless. Listen, hear and the world expands in every direction. We are too used to looking we forget to listen too. So listen and behind the sounds of the birds and insects there is a vastness and a sense of something timeless that surrounds us.
We have lost this connection I think, living in our machine age. Our televisions, radios, mp3 players, there is music and chatter everywhere. In supermarkets, cafes, buses, lifts, we live our lives in a shell of aimless sound and gossip. Our attention is always hooked outside of us. And we allow this to happen because that silence is too scary to experience. That vastness is too huge and we, who have not faced our true selves and found the inner core that cannot be blown away, are too afraid to face it for fear of not being enough.
To connect to this silence for a few minutes everyday puts us back in connection with ourselves and who we really are. I have heard it said that only troubled people seek peace. If that is the case then I am grateful for my worries and my inner angst because it pushed me in a direction I would not have found otherwise.
The child walks through the garden his eyes and ears open, his mouth open in wonder. Trees shaded him from the sun, parrots squawked and flew in a flurry of colour, a fig tree laden with fruit offers a branch with ripe fruit. He takes one and eats it, startled at the intensity of the flavour. He walks on soft grass, cut short and tidy, a white peacock ambles across his path, not bothering to take notice of him. He walks, taking in everything eyes looking up and down and around and above him and below him. He comes across a pool, an ornamental pool, quite large, with a small wall around it. In the pool are three huge old fish swimming in slow circles, two gold and one silver.
They swim in endless circles, when the sun shines and the pool is a mirror of glass they swim, when it rains and the rain makes a hissing noise as it hits the surface of the pool they swim, when it is winter and the surface of the pool is frozen they sink to the deeper parts and swim even slower. The water is their world and is all they have ever known, this water, this pool, this branch hanging over head, this face that hangs over their pool twice a day and drops the coloured flakes that is their food. They rise slowly and with gulping motion of their wide mouths they swallow the red and yellow and brown flakes.
