CAN YOU HEAR IT IN THE SILENCE?

This morning the air brings the aroma of what I used to call mouldy mops. Mops that had been in a cleaning cupboard somewhere for too long. Stored away when damp and not aired. The grass is sodden and squelchy, and my body is still slightly tired from a weekend away at a yarn festival. Kath and I did Yarndale! My first time in Skipton and I would definitely return. Other stall holders had told me to think carefully about footwear and warmth and they were right. Sturdy shoes and layers were definitely needed. I loved it when my sister messaged to say, “I’m not being funny, but your photos look like you are in a cattle market in one of the pens.”

Alt text nails it with the description of this week’s photo because it is indeed, “Two women smiling for the camera”. You can just about make out some knitted flowers in the background and this was the ‘Yarndale Meadow’ and it was beautiful. I love the photo for capturing us just before we started up again on Sunday after a busy Saturday. And I love having a photographic capturing of what for us was a big weekend.

Before packing the cars and heading off for our weekend adventures I spent some time thinking about silence last week. I have thought a lot about silence as a poet and as a coach. I know for example that work I have done to develop my voice means that I wouldn’t now be able to write my poem Silence. That poem was a moment in time that needed setting down, and my relationship with silence has evolved since then. It is still evolving and that in itself is a joy.

Listening to a conversation on The Coaching Inn Podcast between Claire Pedrick and Oscar Trimboli opened up my thinking even more and began to bring the two sets of thinking together for me. My thoughts started to unfold as I listened in and I found myself transported to standing on the path in the forest at Loggerheads, three o’clock in the morning waiting for the dawn chorus, waiting to hear the first blackbird sing. I found myself visualising silence as a space with complete width and depth. I saw it as a darkness about to be lit up.

That image of silence being a space and width that enables things to emerge got me thinking about the times in a coaching room when something similar happens. Silence as a canvas for thoughts and feelings. When I feel that kind of silence in front of me in a coaching room it gives me a tingle of excitement and curiosity as I wonder what is going to emerge. When I am gifted it, I can feel my thoughts being given a welcome, open space. There’s a real joy when this is created between two people and the very essence of it can be felt. Palpable silence.

I have a poetry workshop that I wrote called “Can You Hear it in the Silence?’ and I can see now that this also relates to my thoughts around the silence of a blank page and the silence between words or lines.

My car mot was due and I chose, as always, to sit in the garage waiting area while this was carried out. I feel like a valued customer there and I will often choose what I might do with the hour or so before I go there so that I treat this as a gift of time for focusing on one thing. This time I wanted to continue reading Pascale Petit’s first novel My Hummingbird Father. I consider this reading time to be a silence, but given that there is a lot of sound associated with the environment of the garage showroom I find this quite intriguing. The words played a film in my mind as I listened to them in my head voice at the same time as successfully tuning out the showroom tv which featured the news and a local radio station which was playing some eighties hits. This felt like immersion, it felt like a silencing of my thoughts that enabled me to be in the pages. It made me think that for me silence has so many facets. When I walk and I get to the quarter that is a country road I can find silence when the rhythm of my walk is settled and steady and I can fade out the sound of my footsteps and breath. Very different from the shiver of silence that comes when there is a solar eclipse.

I think I rather like thinking about silence and I think it was the perfect balance to the weekend where we were surrounded by the sounds of show setting up, happening and closing down again. This included the wonderful echo of sheep’s calls on Saturday morning as they arrived to their pens. Deep, throaty sounds as if to say, “Wow there are a lot of humans in this space today”.

I think I will return to thinking about silence… whether other people consider it rare, how they visualise it and what kind of silences they love. For now I will leave you with two poems that I have set down along the way:

IT IS NOT ABOUT DAWN

It is about that moment

before the dark time breaks,

being present in the silence,

standing still in an exact moment.

It is all about when that first bird sings,

first light,

the fact that there is an order

that layer upon layer

sculpts the day’s beginning.

It is about discovering how long it takes

before the crow starts to echo back

with his rough

cruck, cruck.

SILENCE

Silence stands in the hallway all night

says she doesn’t need to sleep.

In the morning, she is in the chair

waiting.

Sometimes she smiles

and I think she gave me the dream

about meeting Dolly Parton for the soundcheck.

Sometimes she is so aloof

I imagine she sent me the handless mob

lumbering towards me,

bloodied boxing gloves

where fingers should have been.

She has birdsong in her;

sends the call of a bittern

to make me laugh

after she has taken me to the darkest silence.

Once she tapped me on the shoulder

at 3am, handed me the car keys

got in the car with me

and directed me to a forest.

She took me over a stile to the darkened path

where we could not see our feet

and the bumps and gnarls of roots

sat under the mud.

Before my eyes adjusted

she stopped me, stood with me

to hear the last owl and the first blackbird.

Once she wrote me a note

folded it and put my name on it

so that she could watch me open it

and read, I am your shadow.

Her drawings tattooed the page –

a tarnished axe

a coffin

and a holly bush

all its leaves on the ground.