Seeing Silence.

When everyone else zig….ZAG.

It’s 4am. I park my car and the door shuts with a beautifully muffled thump. It feels like audio made in a recording studio. Pines, mosses, beech, birch, horse chestnut trees, a ghyll, a blackbird, together with the bowl-shaped Langdale valley, all seem to contribute to this very special soundscape. And the scent of the air! When aromatic savour of the pine, wet from the rain, goes searching into the deepest recesses of my lungs, I know it life that is entering! And I draw that life in! 

I want to put a ding in the Universe.

And so... I walk out of my body and into the mountain...

Today I had a conversation with my true self. She asked me why I had abandoned her, why I had ignored all her constant advice. And then she reminded me of all the things I had forgotten. And never once did she say, “I told you so."

Those of you who know me best, know I am an addict. I’m addicted to the natural world. I love looking upwards through a canopy of trees to catch a glimpse of sky, tuning out life’s noisy noise so my ears and head vibrate with birdsong instead, all while inhaling great clouds of fresh air through my nose. Watching the surge of a full-moon tide thrills me as much as tracing my fingers around the helix of a fallen pine cone on a forest floor. I can’t think of a better smell than the musky odour of earth after rain: the scent of life itself, geosmin.

“Once you get over the fear, then 
it’s a cinch,” she said. And then she 
leaped into a mountainous and unexplored 
region of her heart.

This storybook realm of fells, stonewalled fields, forests, whitewashed cottages, and clear waters is my playground. I am indeed a daughter of the mountains teaching myself to balance on uneven ground, gathering clues from the wind and the navigation of the birds, learning the difference between being wild, and being free. Though the Lakes’ mountains may be modest compared with the world’s great ranges, their beauty is certainly worthy of lofty standing.

She woke up and realized she had forgotten the definition of impossible. She decided it must not have been that important.

But when I walk before sunrise, it is the silence that takes my breath away. The silence is all but absolute, and as I listen to it, I find myself slipping out of time. I’m not talking about a mere negation of sound. This is like a new element, and the world is suddenly suspended there, and I in it.

One of those days where you listen long enough to the sound of the hills & the water & the wind & you give up on words for a while because none of them are big enough.

And if there is any secret to this life I live, this is it: the sound of what cannot be seen sings within everything that can. And there is nothing more to it than that.

Her entire life led to the moment when she said, ‘this is the life I want!’ & she never again wasted time on anything that wasn’t that!

Here, hush is healing.

It is an act of love to listen. Fully & well.