In Silence, Listen

Shhhh…

“We’ve stopped hearing the Scops owl”, my wife said to me the day we returned to our mountain home this weekend.

It may have shifted habitat over the last five years, I suggested, as neighbours colonised the land, and built homes, one of which was five years in the making, five years of mule trains lugging material up from the road, of clearing scrub and trees, of construction debris and the whine, whine, whine of cutting tiles and polishing stone. But that’s behind us now, our roof repair is also done, and nature is reclaiming its place on the hillside.

As evidence, a neighbour had just sent us a video of a family of barking deer, grazing in our patch of forest, their hides lustrous in the spring sun. This morning I lay awake in my blankets, watching daylight grow in the patch of skylight above my sleeping son. Unmoving, unwilling to disturb the silence of the morning. Like drops of water from a leaking tap, insistent and regular, I heard the Scops owl after several years, marking time, marking the silence of the forest.

The busy-ness of the morning is now behind us, the breakfast done, and the lunch cooked and waiting on the stove top. My wife has migrated to her office down the hill, and my son is testing his cycling legs against the hill roads. A brain-fever bird registers its presence from a tree at the far end of our grounds, so distant that a soft intake of my breath drowns it out. When we both take a break, the loudest sound is the ringing of silence.

Benji has been on an extended visit from across the fence since well before breakfast. A bhotiya the size of a baby bear, he rolled over in the garden, begging for a belly rub, moaning in submission when I obliged. When I migrated indoors to write this, he followed an hour later, sniffing the mood… “Hmm, no belly rub now.” He sank to the wooden floor in an audible slump.

In the silence, you hear.

You hear the fever of your own brain, the compulsive need to do, to read, to consume.

In the clamour of the city, I excuse this as a defence against the noise. The only way to deal with the noise is to make your own, to immerse yourself in work that creates its own chatter.

Last week, I was so exhausted by the din of the city that I dreamt of spending the rest of my life on a bugyal, a high altitude meadow overlooking the snows, where streams issue from under rocks, where sheep graze on grass sloping away in green infinity, and lammergeiers circle overhead. Yes, winter will come, and the bugyal turn bleak and inhospitable. But one can dream… and at least one more time, before these legs turn soft, I will climb through temperate rainforest to those high reaches of infinite romance.

Meanwhile, there is this - my mountain fastness, a fifteen minute trudge from the road, not far enough to keep me from walking up, yet far enough for the shriek of air horns to be filtered by the pines and oaks. And in this silence, I set myself a new challenge, to be as quiet as the soft air of spring.

Not for a day, or even for an hour. But for one moment at a time.

Quiet enough to listen. To really listen to my heart.

In the silence of the forest, there can be no excuses.