Sometimes Silence

The things which need not be said

We all have days like this, when big things wander through our mind - sensed but unseen - like wild animals in the undergrowth of a dark forest on a half moon night. We know they are there and we almost want to see them, but we also try to ignore them, in the hope that they might ignore us, fearful of what they might be.

Even in bright daylight some ideas remain formless; words on the tip of our tongue, tasted but …. unenunciated.

A new friend I have here - if Substack is a “here” and if a friend is someone I may never meet (though both seem real enough to me) - just wrote something simple and beautiful about my recent story - Volcanic - which is in part a meditation on the death, and life, of a very good friend.

What Kiki wrote was “I have no words. Just tears and gratitude.”

So I read that this morning, and it touched my heart deeply, and I wondered how to reply - or even if I needed to reply.

I wrote back:

“Dear Kiki. Words have limitations anyway. There is so much more I could say about my friend, and then there are all the things I should have said to him.

Another friend - now also gone - once said to me: The most important things are the things you never need to say.

Sometimes silence says everything.”

And then I sat for a while, and made myself look at the formless thoughts that have hunted me today. Instead of hiding, I hunted them right back, and as I hunted they slowly became clearer, and they took that most ordinary of shapes - the simple fear of loss, and the sadness that comes at the thought of the sadness to come.

Because sadness and grief are inevitable if you love, and if you live long enough, and I am a most fortunate man to have loved so much, and lived so long, and eventually that debt will be repaid.

But this is the way of the world, and to focus on loss is to miss the beauty of the whole - because all things change, and move, and become something else, in time.

It is all a cycle. It is all a dance,

and we dance while we can,

which is why

I wrote

this:

Cabin
by the creek,
the water whirling away 
remembering clouds, moving,
reflecting the hills, shimmering,  
becoming a river, colours rippling,
departing and arriving, not staying or leaving,
always changing, always being itself, never asking why.

Life 
too is like this -
the birthing and renewing,
the rising towards something,
and then the leaving, the letting go,
relinquishing - raindrops released from the sky.