Sometimes when the air is so still and thick that you don’t want to move, then take a blanket and lie down. Watch the clouds…wonder at how they shift and move when there is no sign of even the breath of a breeze. Notice how they seem to merge into each other until the whole sky is thick and dark with shifting layers, and then within minutes they have vanished.
Watch grey break down into white. Pick a cloud and just watch that face you thought you saw, as it smiles and then melts and stretches. Thinning. Vanishing.
On such a day, you can close your eyes for a few moments and when you open them again, the whole sky scape has changed. The sun has disappeared. Or what was grey is now blue. Or maybe a slither of moon is brightening as the sun lowers somewhere beyond the trees.
It is good to talk, but sometimes it is even better not to. Sometimes, like, say, on a hot humid summer afternoon, it is good to take a picnic and a blanket to the edge of the hay meadow. To eat without speaking much, focussing on the abundance of the food, and how it feels to eat it. Maybe your mouth is tender, or your teeth are sore. Maybe the soup is still surprisingly hot. Maybe the heat and humidity has robbed you of your appetite. Maybe you’re tired. But you eat anyway. Sprouting seed salad. Bread. Cheese. Water with a slice of lemon. Enough.
And then…give thanks…and lie back to digest. Listen to the sounds of your body finding its comfortable position on the ground. If you’re lucky you’ve brought a cushion for your head – just high enough so that your shoulders can reach back and touch ground. Raise your knees, so that your feet contact directly with the solidity beneath you.
Close your eyes and listen. Make no judgement on what you hear. Just notice. There is a relaxing peacefulness in just noticing. The latest term for it is soft fascination. Just allowing yourself to notice what is. No interpretation. No thinking. Just a relaxed noticing.
I hear birds. Over to the right, beyond the vegetable garden I hear four distinct calls. The only one I can identify is blackbird. Something that sounds finch-like. Two others, trebling or warbling. Sweet calls. Down-left of my position, but high in the tree, another blackbird responds. Pigeons coo-c’cooo…and then with their distinctive wing-flap panick into the air. There are red kites about.
The kite whistles, and then after a few heartbeats the alarm-sounding call of a maybe kestrel. I’m guessing here and will later play tag with websites that try to teach me the sounds and my memory of them after the event. In the moment I’m just listening to the music and alarum and idly wondering if I will ever learn who is saying what, and letting it pass as a maybe, maybe not. Today I don’t need to rush for a phone app that might tell me what I’m listening to – today, I simply need to lie here and listen.
I hear a rustling of footsteps in the long grass. The hunter returns, the man says, videocam in hand, in search of the kite, but it is being evasive today. The man smiles. He doesn’t seem to mind. The kite is nesting hereabouts; they're not saying exactly where. I close my eyes again. Coffee’s brewing, someone else says, from somewhere behind the woodshed. I don’t move.
I listen to time slipping past. It sounds like a heartbeat…that might well be my own.
I listen to the clouds, but hear nothing from this distance.
Even the wind is stealthy today. It sneaks through the long grass and the buttercups and the clover, without so much as a snake-like slither. The hay looks ready for cutting, early this year. Maybe it will be left a while, for more of a seeding. I hear the dim chirrup of a cricket or grasshopper.
I’m thinking it might be time for cheesecake, someone says. Not yet, I think. And I simply lay and listen to them breathing, slowing, snoring. I open my eyes, and turn my head, to watch them sleeping. It makes me smile. There is a compliment inherent in someone trusting you enough to simply fall asleep in your presence – the comfort, the knowing they do not need to entertain you,
they do not need to fear you, they can simply be there beside you, beside the hay meadow…looking at the sky, closing their eyes, and listening. And letting go.
There is space between us on this blanket. In fact, there is the remnants of lunch in the space between us. But around us are the trees. Behind us is the woodshed. Above us is the shifting sky. And beside us is the hay meadow. And threading through all of it, is a long languid summer afternoon in which ‘not talking’ was perhaps the deepest conversation we could have had.
