Silent Answers

“These are the times in life – when nothing happens – but in quietness the soul expands.”

 

Rockwell Kent

 

My feet crunched again on the hard grit of the track that starts at the dark moor, goes over the hill and down into the deep woods. I was walking like a person who has somewhere to be; straight legged, heel striking, thumping my way along the man made path. It’s a noisy way to walk. The noise not only of feet, but of clothes rustling against themselves, a bag strap creaking and the sound of my body breathing. The noises of my movement and my body overwhelmed any natural sound that could reach me. With eyes down on the ground, because I went so fast I must look at where my feet will land, I saw little of the things around me.

 

A mile or so further on it was time to leave the track and the noise behind. With the now habitual shoulder glance up and down the path, I stepped off into the woods again. After a few paces I slipped out of the clumsy town-walk and into the silent way; the fox walk. The walk of the woods.

 

Walking silently through the forest – truly silently – is a skill that takes practice. The woods of the Cairngorms are dense. The tangled old forest has never been cut. Juniper bushes are piled over each other in fractal eruptions; heather stretches up from below and every line of sight is confounded by webs of fallen branches. Everything I touched seemed designed to create as much noise as possible. My trousers scraped together, twigs scratched and snapped and pine needles sang out my movement to all listeners by grating against my bag like the needle of a record player. When a single step is a racket then a walk is a cacophony. It spreads out before you like a bow wave through the woods, driving the silence away. So you must be patient, stretch the time of each pace out to methodical seconds, and repeat with the slow solemnity of ritual. Walk in silence so you may see, hear and feel, but do it also for simple respect of the silence itself.

 

This is how the forest itself has taught me to move. You begin by raising your foot slowly from the heel. Lift it high and stretch it forward. Reach for the ground gently. Feel it bit by bit, as if your foot were your hand, searching for a hold that will not betray you on a rock climb. You are searching here for that place your foot can press gradually without making a sound. Place it down with love for the things you stand on, and stand on it with care. Ease the pressure on, lighten it from the foot you are leaving behind. Then raise the back foot, slowly and from the heel. Don’t think about it. Just be; like the showers coming down from the sky.

The benefit of walking this way is that it frees your senses, and lets you actually take in the things around you. Keep your head up, don’t look down. Your eyes are for looking, your feet for walking; learn to let them find the way. You see more like this. The walk we all learn in towns – noisy concrete thumping – does not serve here. Walk as a fox does – with steady gaze and flowing body. Your steps here have the metre of poetry, not the cadence of mantra. 

 

With practice you can still move quickly, but quietly. You can flow into and out of each den of trees with the ghost-like grace of the fox. The forest is a quiet place. Nothing here makes noise without need – only humans are so reckless with sound. But the woods are teaching me how to be quiet, and they are teaching me how to be still – a word that means more than simply not moving.

 

Stillness is inside the trees even as they sway in the wind. It’s in the spaces between the trees and the gaps among stones in the soil. It’s in the spreading rings of water as rain falls on the surface of the pools, and in the stones that lie in the riverbed. What exactly it is I can’t say, but I know that’s it inside me too. If I sit quietly and listen to what’s inside me I find it – the peace, the stillness, the quiet. The forest showed me that silence leads to stillness, and stillness to silence. It bid me listen to the quiet, to find its stillness and to unite it with my own. It showed me how noisy I was not just on the outside, but on the inside too. Just stop for a minute, it said. Stop doing, start being. And start by being still.

 

Stillness and silence as words are both described by the absence of something – absence of noise or absence of movement. But that is not what they are. They are themselves tangible, real and present.

 

Noise breaks silence, but sound does not. Noise tramples it down and makes silence flee. Sound knocks upon the door of silence – opens it gently. Movement breaks the stillness, drags itself over it. Flow is stillness itself in motion. The wind whispering in the branches does not break them, nor the patter of rain, nor the rush of the river water, nor the crunch of footsteps on snow. These are all part of the silence and the stillness; they enhance it, and the only way that I too can become part of the forest is through them.

 

I stepped off the path and started to slip between the trees, flowing from one foot to the next, listening and trying to embody the peace I felt all around. Too often we are observed, and not the observer. I stalked across the carpet of soft pine needles beneath sepia branches. A tiny hint of rain was in the air, the sky grey. My ears and heart were open to the slightest sounds; the flutter of wings in the trees above; the distant breath of the river carrying over the air. I walked like a stalker who was listening for his quarry, ready to detect the faintest clue. But for me, it was the silence itself that I stalked. I came down to the clearing beneath the dark moor. This was the same neck of the woods I had walked through that first day, when I felt like a vandal for leaving footprints. And when I wondered about little Gods sleeping in the trees. 

 

I still had no answer to such a question, but I had at least learned to move without breaking the silence. I had paid attention to that lesson, for it seemed that when answers did come they did so in silence. 

 

I learned this lesson on a day that seemed to have no particular merit to recommend it. When I arrived at the dark moor and wondered why I was even there, for it was just a grey day like many thousands of others. But there was an atmosphere of unusual quietness, even for that place. It was that which made me hesitate at the car door, having had a cursory glance at the view and deciding I had seen it on better days. 

 

There was no sound of car or voice. Not even a bird. Just the trees standing there, bare branched in their winter sleep and stirred by gentle airs. I made a decision to walk a little way, and took the track that threaded down among the birch trees. 

When it happened it was so slow that I did not notice at first. Behind me was the hilltop where the dark moor rose like an island above the woods. Gently, silently, a grey floe of mist began to drift into the trees from the periphery of the slopes behind me. Sliding in from left and right, interlinking its fingers among the trees.

 

I had never seen this before – mist from a grey sky at midday. I thought only to find mist early on cold mornings, lying like a blanket in the depths and hollows of the land. But like the slow drifting snout of a glacier the mist drove irresistibly down among the trees, obscuring distance. But where a glacier drives soil and stone before its advance, the silver vapour simply flowed among things. The shadow of its grey hand fell over everything, turning the peace into true silence. Then, the distant clouds above shifted just enough to allow the golden light of the winter sun to flood the forest. Suddenly, with no warning at all, the whole place was suffused with the brilliant glow of swirling droplets, drifting through the air like clouds of galactic stardust.

 

The golden mist was as unexpected as lightning from a blue sky. It was like being bathed in gentle fire. Where had the grey winter day gone? The very atmosphere had come to life with tiny stars. Water droplets drifted lightly on the air, sitting in total stillness and then effortlessly coming alive with movement. At first they resembled motes of dust hanging in a sunbeam, but where dust motes swirl like static – each one going its own way – the water vapour around me flocked. Like birds, they moved only together, shifting and drifting this way and that, then coming to rest, inseparable and dense. Flow. Stillness in motion.

 

I walked down into the trees, as I had done a hundred times by now, but this time different. There was the high fence of pines once again, with huge beams of sunlight piercing through their branches as sunrays. It was a captivating sight. The canopy was a vaulted ceiling of needles, with windows through which the light shone in golden shafts. I held up a hand to the sun rays and beams of shadow cast themselves from my fingers. The pattern of the universe is in everything small as it is in everything large.

 

In the clearing beyond the pine trees stood an especially huge and magnificent Scots Pine, with a spreading green canopy in the prime of its long life. It was a shadow against the golden air, standing among moor grasses which were made lustrous by the glow. Where the mist drew itself thin I could see strata of cloud laid over the distant hills like a second layer of mountain, running a line of silver edged light across the edge of the world.

It was the most wonderful thing I had ever seen in the woods. As a seeker of beauty in the forest, to me it had something close to a holy air about it. And the forest itself had fallen into such silence, and such stillness, that it must have felt that way too. There was nothing I could do but look, and look. So I sat down there, looking, bathing in golden silence and flowing light. The peace was absolute. No sound whatsoever. Drops of mist hanging in the air except where my breath made them swirl. The only thing touching the peace was what I had inside of myself.

For time unknown I simply sat and watched. Gradually I let go of thought, and of questions. They slipped out of me and disappeared in total calm. There was nothing left except this moment, ongoing. 

I rose to my feet, without making any decision to do so, and with a smoothness and quietness previously unknown to me I began to walk forward. Raise each foot from the heel, softly. Step by step, I began to walk around the magnificent pine tree that stood like a shadow in a nebula. I told myself ‘walk, but if you actually move then you’re going too fast’. Actually I did not tell myself that. I simply knew it. I must not disturb a single blade of grass, not a single drop of water. Every step had something new to show me – a different aspect of the place. I took minutes between steps, trying to avoid even the slightest scrape of foot on grass. At the far side from where I had started I was looking toward the tree with the sun at my back, and a perfect semi-circular fogbow arched over it’s graceful shape. This exceptional moment of artistry in nature was saying something. The white archway in the air looked like a protective shield above the tree – warding off harm, or perhaps simply there to centre attention on it. Look here, and listen.

 

I turned slowly on the spot, staring about in every direction at the woods that faded into the golden mist. Something inside me slipped away, went out into it, among the branches; and the tree trunks; and heathery lumps; and the lichens; and the whole great mess of the thing. I could see the beams of light striking through the forest for miles around; the tips of branches reaching out to the mist drops that moved gracefully through the air in untold multitudes; and the mountains looking down on it all. The something-in-me touched something-in-it, and suddenly my heart flew back to me through the unmoving quietness of it all. I felt dizzy. A deep shiver ran down my back, and I eased myself down to sit in the grass once more, suddenly breathless. The forest was speaking to me, in silence and in stillness, and I could finally hear it.

The forest had reached out to me, and unwittingly I had somehow reached back. For the briefest moment I had stepped across the line that divided us. That was how it felt. The shock of the connection made me withdraw to myself at the instant it was made, but I could not make it occur again by any force of willpower. I sat there in the wet grass, my emotions rising in confusion, in delight, in bittersweet joy that only a taste was forthcoming. I tried to reach out again, tried to imagine the things which a moment ago I had simply known. But my conscious mind had re-erected some barrier between myself and the world. 

 

I hadn’t even known that barrier existed. It was like a pane of glass through which I could look, but not feel. I had never imagined I could go out into the world that way. But now I knew that barrier was there, and I knew I had felt the edge. Had stepped around it for a moment. Perhaps I could learn to do so again.

 

Later on, after I had filled myself at the well of peace and wandered home through a forest that had forever changed, I reflected on that most disquieting instant of contact. Now that I came to think of it, I had in fact felt this deep connection once before, as if the boundary that defined ‘me’ and ‘it’ had grown fuzzy. 

 

Years before, I had been sitting one evening beside the river Tay at the end of a day kayaking. The day had been long and I was tired. All afternoon we had paddled in the rapids, practising manoeuvres among the thundering rush of water and spray drenched boulders. Punching through waves, surfing from one to another, reading the flow of the water and learning to use it to our advantage. All the time on the water you were a physical blend of water, paddle, boat and your own body. You learned to think with your body, react before your mind could get in the way. Reach the bottom of the rapid, get out and carry your boat back to the top. Do it again. Do it again. Do it again. Paddle down the rapid, paddle across the rapid. Swim in it, swim across it. Practise practise practise.

As the sun finally set and our wet kit drip dried on makeshift washing lines, I sat cross-legged on a boulder, relaxed as I stared into the foaming waves. On the upstream side the water piled itself up in heaps before deciding no, the rock would not be moved. Let’s go around. I was thinking about the feeling of the force of the water on the stone. Half imagining and half remembering the weight of it, the strength; the absolutely unyielding, relentless pressure of it. Earlier in the day I had stood in the water on the downstream side, using the rock as shelter from the full force of the flow before launching myself into it, letting it take me downstream for another swim. But just for a moment, before you let yourself go, you try to stand against it. Bear all your weight forward and feel the unstoppable power of the water on your whole body. Then your feet are swept out from under you, and suddenly you are floating gently through the foaming waves.

And yet, the water itself seemed… helpless? Yes, helpless was the word. It was no indomitable will or unstoppable force. What choice did it have? Given the chance it would just as soon sit still, as rush down this river. Something clicked in me. Thought of water and sensation of water aligned in sudden realisation. The weight of the water, the weight… It was doing nothing more than falling. Falling endlessly, falling under the pull of gravity, rushing downwards in total helplesness. Falling sideways across the land, every drop of it pushed along by a million more behind it. 

 

My mind was borne down helplessly under the pressure of all that water as it tried to hold on, then suddenly felt light as I let it go. My imagination – I thought then that was all it could be – raced up the river, as fast as thought can go. Into the tributaries and the mountain burns, the waterfalls and springs in the far off hills. It raced downstream with the growing current, into the waves of the far off sea. All the water in the all the world connected, moving because it cannot help itself. And I was here, touching the whole thing. I reeled with dizziness, shocked with understanding and apprehension of the weight of all that water and its unstoppable motion. I stretched out on my belly and reached a hand down, to touch all the water in the world. 

But as my hand felt the splash of that bubbling cold the moment passed, and though I remained aware of this new understanding there was nothing I could do to feel it again. The barrier in my mind was up once more – the glass wall around myself. But I know now that there is a state of mind, or of being, in which we can connect with the world on the deepest, or perhaps highest, level. Even if it is in fact only a momentary illusion, then I would still seek after it. In silence, in flowing stillness, I would seek it; stalking through the woods in the way of the fox.