beauty and silence

The weather is almost heartbreakingly beautiful at the moment, as though we are being rewarded, or perhaps gentled along through this great pause that has been forced upon us. Yet that awareness is always balanced by the knowledge that there is heartbreak across the globe as more folk die of this contagion.

Here in the garden and in my trips to the shops for necessities I am aware all the time of the background silence. It extends the physical space that surrounds me, by giving access to distant sounds, normally drowned by the constant buzz of traffic and other human generated noise; crows in the trees across the valley, "thank you NHS clapping" in the streets surrounding us on a Thursday evening. We are five minutes away from one of the main routes along the south coast, in fact the only route West from Dover unless you choose to go up to the M25, so not some delightful rural backwater. Our home is in the outskirts of a conurbation that basically stretches across 3 small towns at the edge of the sea. Even more so, I am struck by this silence.

I noticed today that I was being tickled by the sense of some echo of this silence within myself, a deep feeling of rightness about it. Then I realised, this is what the world sounded and felt like in my childhood; there was so much less traffic that you could actually hear; rather than living in a state of constant unconscious filtering, you could truly feel the space you were surrounded by.

Even more beautiful just now is the expanse of the night, as the young moon nestled in darkness watches Venus throwing her clear light down to us.