In the biting cold of this December morning. Everything frost-edged and crisp. Mist white, soft grey, screening the south, over the vast flat fields lined with the plantings of white-rimmed winter growing.
I set out to listen, and to notice what I hear. To settle on some single wild thing and know it only with hearing.
Past yesterday’s road kill outside the village church, a sad grey squirrel, much flattened by the frequent passing of cars. And the shimmering sound of the crisp brown leaves of the beech hedge by the road.
I quickly come to my favourite lane – a green lane, untroubled by cars.
I listen. Listen for wild sounds but hear only a generator in farm buildings away in the mist, and the wasp-like buzz of a chain saw. The wild is silent.
The wild is silent, beyond the rare rustle of some small creature in the litter and a solitary bird hissing alarm further down the lane ahead of me. And the silence is the absence of sound, the lack of what I am listening for. There is nothing to hear.
I move down the lane, slowly, in fits and starts. It’s too cold to linger. But I linger anyway. Right cheek tingling in the cold, finger tips numb in gloves that fail to do their job.
Transfixed by the frost. How it dwells so differently on each plant form. Frosting the green leaves of the brambles, highlighting the red of the haw berries, becoming part of the very structure of the thistle heads. I take photos but wonder why. The magic is always lost outside the moment of seeing.
Transfixed by the fog. Is it fog or is it mist? What do those words mean? It seems still and unchanging, but every time I look back to a place that was once just white glow, something has appeared. The broken line of a hedgerow – bushes, trees and gaps. Or the angular lines of a modern farm building unseen before.
I immerse myself in the icy, white glow of the monochrome land around me.
But not much hearing.
Then up ahead, the alarm call of a wren. Aware of me long before I notice him. I find him with my binoculars. His energetic, twitchy movements up through the hawthorn bush. The high churr-churr of his alarm. But the churr-churr comes in bursts. Such a loud, intense sound for a tiny bird. But I know all that. I have watched wrens a thousand times. However as I listen and watch, I hear his silence. The darting movement up through the bush continues. All that tiny energy but in silence. I become transfixed by the contrast. Jerky but stationary on a branch, churr-churr-churr. Then darting upward in silence.
Then a dart across into a clump of frost-starched grasses nearer to me and he disappears. For a long time. In the ice cold I watch. And listen. I know he is there. But the only thing that emanates from the clump is his silence. I become transfixed by it. I know he is there but no leaf shifts. Just the presence of the silence. As I listen it spreads out over the area. A radiant silence. I become intensely aware of the quality of the absence of sound. But not a generalised absence, rather the specific radiance of the silence of that one particular little bird, invisible to me now.
Just for a moment I sense all the other silences in the trees and bushes of the hedgerows that line the green lane.
The wren emerges from the clump. One long swoop to another thorn sapling further up the lane. I raise my binoculars to him as he jerks and bobs on the dark stem. I attune to his silence once again and realise that I am using a sort of heart hearing. Such an unsatisfactory way to name it. But I am inclining more than just my hearing system to pick up the silence of that tiny bird.
And I realise that I am inclining towards the unique silence of that single bird. Yes, with its general wrenliness but also the unrepeatable presence of that one and only creature.
My attention tires in the cold. I sup my hot coffee. And move on. The wren darts away out of my consciousness.
But the world had changed a little.
I start to hear the silence in everything. No longer is silence the absence of sound. No longer is the silence I hear the absence of the sounds I was searching for at the beginning of the lane. I start to suspect that the world is full of endless unique silences. The silence of every being, the silence of every place. All just out of awareness until I tilt my hearing in a certain way and the presence of each silence steps into my experience.
I continue up the lane. I linger in front of each bush and tree in the hedgerow. First, a deep green holly, listening to its silence. Then three young thorns, still in their deer protection sheaths. Then an old twisted oak buried in the hedge. Each one emanates a different feeling of silence. Is the language of a wild thing, in its essence, a soundless sound?
Earlier I had engaged my mind in wanting to fully enter into and name the unique landscape I was walking through. Now I shifted my mode of perception. Listening into the silent presence of the fields, the hedgerows, the big oaks, the white fog, the smudged disk of the sun, the unlooked for crescent moon in the thin blue sky. Not now just the silence of the wren and the holly but of the whole land.
I have always valued, sought to drop into, a sense of arriving, being present in any new place. But, in leading me to follow him into the ice-green grass stand, had that little brown bird, knowingly or unknowingly, led me into a new way of listening, a new way of relating with the more-than-human world. A world that speaks to itself, and to us, as much through silence as through sound.
Wren Image uncredited
Landscape image mine
