I start with the idea of silence and questions. I start with questions about how much of ourselves we share. How much of what we show is truly us? How much of us do we truly show? And how much should we? I have no answers. Only questions.
Some questions need to be sat with.
And sometimes it is the sitting that is important and not the questions.
So, I sit. Quietly waiting. To see what comes. And nothing does. No howling wolves or crying babies. No false loves or true ambitions. I sit quietly and there is only silence.
Learning to be alone is learning to sit with silence, with no need to distract the mind. No need to focus on anything – not even the breath. Merely to sit and see (or hear) what comes. Sit with silence as a trusted friend and you will see that she is not silent at all.
We often talk of sitting “in” silence, but that is not the way. If silence speaks, then we must listen and respond. Sit with her and see (or hear) what she has to say. Talk to her if that is what she asks of you.
The page is silent. And today I am waiting to hear. To learn. Not looking for answers. Just listening.
Of course, some days the silence is well-named. Some days she holds her tongue – and if we would befriend her, we must allow her that privilege. Trust that it is not a withholding, merely a holding, a pause.
And if we learn to sit with silence, we can hear her breathing. It is our own silence, and not hers, that matters most.
Befriending a place is much like befriending silence. We need to come at it quietly. Obliquely. Slowly. Learn to sit quietly byits side. Let the questions arise, and not run headlong to answer them. Treasure the sitting, the walking, the wandering, the wondering. Hold the questions, for they are keys into histories and her-stories and mysteries, none of which need be rushed.
Making friends takes time.
This is my first time here.
In a quiet spot near St Margaret’s Church, I sit and listen.
I hear hammering and sawing and drilling. A creak of a door or an old rusting gate.
I hear voices too muted to make out words, but it feels like an instinctive, important conversation – strange how we can hear meaning without knowing what, exactly, it means.
I hear traffic passing.
Life going on in its 21st century way.
I hear a robin and, maybe, a dunnock.
I hear the mud-squelch of walkers. The gravel crunch as they step onto a different surface.
Once this would have been a spot of louder lives. I would have heard the shouts of sailors and merchants. The dray cart and the dockside loading. And the women, depending on the time of day, I would have heard the calls of the fishwives, and the whores, and the hawkers. I would have heard horses and all the raucous calls of a busy port. The hammering I heard would not have been of single nails, but the pounding of the blacksmith shaping metal: for shoes, for sail-masts, for the cooper, for the ornamentation of the church.
I would have heard the church: its bells and priests and protestations and who knows what street-ministry looked like then.
Perhaps then the voices whose words were lost on the wind would have belonged to those who are now no more than names carved in stone, or those already lost to the weathering. Perhaps they were the voices that never lived a second beyond their silence, voices no-one thought worth remembering.
I would have heard the sound of water lapping, on the ebb orthe flow, in the channels or the over-wash, where now there is only a soft, slightly boggy, green, where later houses were built, and were lost to a fire. Fire and water, not in that order, and then the centre of the village moved away from the church.
Geographically.
I sit by a buttressed wall and ask if once the waters lapped against it. It doesn’t tell me. I don’t really need to know.
In a quiet corner there is a bright blue plaque, that I would wish to have been more muted, more solid, more enduring, but its message touched my soul:
Live your best & Act your best
and Think your best today
Within the circle of these words is an explanation:
Celebrating our community’s resilience in the year of the pandemic.
How rarely do we see a celebration of community, rather than the individual heroics? How rarely do we raise a monument to persistence and survival and continuance rather than to what we have lost? When did we lose the ability to celebrate life which, surely, we must do, at least as much as we continue to mourn death and destruction. Life and resilience. What continues is surely at least as important as what does not.
It takes me to another question. And another…
What does resilience sound like? Would I know it if I heard it? What does it look like, smell like, taste like? Would I recognise it if I found it?
Perhaps it sounds like the creak of burning timber before the roof collapses, added to the shattering of glass, but rises to its crescendo in the solid silence of the walls that remain. Maybe it sounds like the slow growth of ivy over those ruins, and the patient cutting back that reveals them again.
Maybe it looks like a flint-bricked doorway, still evident in its arch, or a concrete-faced lost window, the chancels that are now mere porches, the tracery open to the sky. Maybe it looks like blank walls, all their frescoes robbed away, all those empty saint-free plinths, waiting for what comes next.
Maybe it looks like rescued wooden panels framed and propped against bare walls, or re-polished brass, or head-stones placed anew so that at least the stories survive. Maybe it is the dustiness of hymn books, waiting, or weary hassocks, or peeling plaster, and paperbacks for sale and postcards, and anything thing else that means that the graves are tended, the roof repaired, the bats can roost.
Maybe it looks like a tiny etching of a lost sparrow in the corner of a window.
Maybe it looks just like a sparrow, white-crowned or otherwise, however far from home.
I know its scent. Resilience has a musty and dusty aroma, with a hint of mildew and incense. It smells of wet earth and catkins. It has that deep green scent of pine and yew, and the delicacy of cherry blossom. It smells of old stone and wood polish. It smells of hope, which really is just the scent of candlewax, still warm.
Sometimes it smells of rain, not yet fallen, that hint of it in the air.
It feels like an unheard echo of songs not yet sung. It is the pain of stretching and growing, and the shock of falling and shrinking, and then the accepting of something that might not actually be the diminishing we thought it was.
We are not taught resilience, any more than we are taught the wisdom of silence. Resilience is not the strength to withstand all the storms and flood and fire and heart-felt brimstone intact. It is not the flexibility to bend before it all and hold still rooted.
Resilience is what comes after being broken.
This is what my first conversation with this place reminds me. It is knowing that roofs will fall, and with them some of your once-held grandeur will be lost. Your glass will shatter and parts of you will be more exposed. Your stones will wear and bear the marks of everyone that walks upon you, but still not wear away entirely. Some of the stories will endure.
The white-washed walls may speak more boldly than the painted panels ever did. The fragments may echo more loudly than the whole could ever sing. But somehow, in all of that, there is a quiet voice telling us: begin again.
And all of my again-beginning, starts in silence. Listening.
