There is a particular kind of silence that comes after we have been very busy, although perhaps silence is not quite the right word, because the world itself has not become quieter; the river is still moving over the stones, birds are still calling from one side of the valley to the other, somewhere a gate closes, a sheep calls from the hillside and another answers, and all the small sounds of an ordinary morning continue without any awareness that something has changed. What has disappeared is not the noise around us but the sense of urgency within us, that almost imperceptible leaning towards whatever comes next.
For a while there has always been something waiting: something to finish, something to solve, something we have promised ourselves we will do before the day ends, and gradually, without quite noticing when it happened, we begin to live a little ahead of ourselves, inhabiting not the moment we are actually in but the one that follows it. While making breakfast we are thinking about the email we need to send, while walking we are arranging the afternoon, while lying in bed we are already negotiating with tomorrow, until anticipation becomes such a familiar state that we barely notice we are no longer entirely where we are.
Then the urgency falls away, and the space it leaves can feel surprisingly unfamiliar, because although we speak often of wanting rest, when it finally appears we may discover that we no longer quite know how to inhabit it. The hand reaches almost automatically for the phone, the mind begins assembling another list, the eye notices something that needs doing, as though an unoccupied hour were an omission that ought to be corrected rather than a place into which we might simply arrive.
Perhaps this is one of the reasons I return so often to the living world, because there I encounter another sense of time, one that seems neither idle nor hurried, but simply absorbed in becoming what the moment requires.
September is proceeding without apparent anxiety about October; some leaves are already loosening their hold while others remain intensely green, the ferns that only a few months ago seemed to be unfurling themselves endlessly into summer are beginning to bend back towards the earth, and along the river the water finds its way around whatever lies before it, dividing around a stone and joining itself again on the other side, gathering briefly in the hollows, darkening beneath the bank, carrying fragments of reflected sky through places where sunlight cannot reach.
I can stand beside it and know that the water is travelling somewhere, that this small river will join another and another and eventually become part of something much larger, yet this knowledge seems strangely irrelevant when I actually watch it, because what I experience is not a river concerned with arriving at the sea but water here, at this particular bend, folding over this particular stone, holding for a moment the trembling reflection of an alder before the image loosens and reforms somewhere farther downstream.
Perhaps our lives are more like this than we imagine, not a succession of places we must reach but a continuous movement through moments we are in danger of overlooking because we are so intent upon arriving at the next one.
We tend to measure our days by what has been accomplished, yet so much of a life consists of things for which there is no useful measure: a cup of tea beside a window while rain gathers on the glass, a dog sleeping nearby, the sudden shadow of a bird passing across the garden, the smell of damp earth when we step outside in the morning. None of these will appear on a list of what we achieved, and yet when we look backwards across the years it is often fragments such as these that return with extraordinary vividness, while whole weeks of busyness have disappeared.
Attention asks something different of us, because when we attend closely we cease, for a moment, to require that what we are looking at justify the time we are giving it. A tree need not become a photograph, a river need not become a destination, and a walk need not become exercise or research; we can notice instead the branch reaching farther than the others, the lichen spreading across the bark, the small circle of water turning behind a stone, and allow the ordinary world to recover the particularity that hurry so easily takes from it.
I sometimes wonder how much of a lifetime can be spent preparing to arrive in it, telling ourselves that we will slow down when the work is finished, when the house is sorted, when there is more certainty, when we have crossed whatever invisible threshold seems to stand between the life we are managing and the life we imagine we might properly inhabit. Yet life seems remarkably unwilling to arrange itself into such a completed state, while the mornings continue to arrive regardless, the light moves across the hillside, moss extends itself almost invisibly over stone, and the last roses soften and curl at their edges, beauty passing quietly into another kind of beauty while we are still deciding which moment should count as its best.
Perhaps rest, then, is not simply the absence of work, but a willingness to stop asking, for a little while, that the world and ourselves should be somewhere other than where we are. There will always be things to make and mend, people to care for, promises to keep and work worth doing, but somewhere amongst all this forward movement there must surely be moments when we allow ourselves to notice what has been happening while our attention was elsewhere.
It may be nothing more remarkable than water moving beneath a bridge, a bird calling from a tree we have passed a hundred times, or the faint movement of a leaf responding to air we cannot see, but if we remain without trying to make the moment useful, we may discover that the space we were so eager to fill was never empty at all; it was simply quieter than we had become accustomed to hearing.
And perhaps this is what the living world has been offering us all along: not an escape from the unfinishedness of our lives, but a place in which we can occasionally stop leaning towards the future and remember that this morning, this river, this changing September light and this one unrepeatable moment are not the spaces between the important parts of our lives.
They are the life itself.
The wild remembers. So do you.
Some of what begins here, in these moments of attention, continues at Moss & Maye, where art, found objects and things with stories of their own are gathered together.