Silence

This is just something interesting that I read, wanted to pen it down...

In a world where frenetic movement is mistaken for progress, strident rhetoric for the inflexion of discourse, it is Jilling's silence that sets its apart. When Bunny and I spent three days there, I sat on the sunlit lawn ouside our cottage and listened to the silence.

The first thing that strikes you about silence is that it is not an absence of sound, for that would make it a sterile vaccuum. Listening to silence is like watching a glass being filled with water, drop by careful drop. When the glass is full, the water brims over the top without spilling, the convex curve of liquid held in place like a drawn bowstring. The silence I listened to at Jilling was like that resonant arc, a supple filament that strung together the ratcheting feathers of a partridge in flight, the sharp call of a barking deer, the leafy conversation of trees, the bubbles of air exploding in the bottle of soda on the table.

I realized that the silence was a gift as fragile as the finest porcelain, as evanescent as the shimmer of a butterfly's wings.