Somehow the silence is always noisy
I walk with my ears open. Sometimes more so than my eyes. And I pause to catch a tear in space, lives lived in this edge to edge of time. I hold them like a small package in the form of a sound clip. And sometimes they have names like: "shovelling snow from the roof", "cranes moaning in the middle of the night", "bull frogs in damhoek".
But they are clumsy inadequate containers. Because even within a 10 second clip, there is a family of sounds that have either always sung together, or have come together for just that moment, for me to hold in awareness.
I am less aware of the soundscape of silence that plays inside me. How the different layers of sounds that make up the humming distance that I feel between my skin, my eyes and the unfolding of time, moment by moment, are folded together in a river that keeps on flowing.
Sometimes I wonder if I am a lake, or the sea, or if I am, a little closer to where I remember, a slow muddy river. That keeps inside her belly the sedimentation of time, so soft and deep, that not even she knows where it ends if I throw a rock inside. Or the movement between that and the clear rush of ice cold water hitting the unexpected sulfuric scalding pockets that rise from under the stones, the sand. If I know where one becomes the other.
I think sometimes I even forget that in the white, exciting noise that circles my life, that there is another distance of silence that is filled with its own sounds, moving along together.
But they are clumsy inadequate containers. Because even within a 10 second clip, there is a family of sounds that have either always sung together, or have come together for just that moment, for me to hold in awareness.
I am less aware of the soundscape of silence that plays inside me. How the different layers of sounds that make up the humming distance that I feel between my skin, my eyes and the unfolding of time, moment by moment, are folded together in a river that keeps on flowing.
Sometimes I wonder if I am a lake, or the sea, or if I am, a little closer to where I remember, a slow muddy river. That keeps inside her belly the sedimentation of time, so soft and deep, that not even she knows where it ends if I throw a rock inside. Or the movement between that and the clear rush of ice cold water hitting the unexpected sulfuric scalding pockets that rise from under the stones, the sand. If I know where one becomes the other.
I think sometimes I even forget that in the white, exciting noise that circles my life, that there is another distance of silence that is filled with its own sounds, moving along together.