I left behind the skylarks whirling over the wheatfields, their flittering, incessant song drifting up on the warm wind rising from the valley.
Crossing into open country again, the path wound through purple heathers and bright yellow blooms of gorse. A buzzard shrieked as I crossed the tops, surfing thermals, wingtips flickering. Dropping down on the far side, I ran through the alarmed call of a nesting curlew and the twitter of finches lining a ragged barbed wire fence.
Time away from the cities and towns quickly retunes your senses. As the throb of traffic and the clatter of people drops away, you enter an airlock of quiet and calm. Your brain adjusting to the sudden removal of the near constant stream of information it’s been working overtime to shut out. And then, in the silence, almost like an afterimage, a new set of sounds begins to push into your consciousness. Close by at first, the sound of blood pulsing in your ears, the push of breath out of your lungs, footsteps skittering across rocks, poles clicking on stone, the crackle of dry gorse as the path tightens around your legs.
And then the world begins to open again, like staring at a black and white image and watching it slowly turn to colour. Wind rushing across the moors, birdsong everywhere. Warning cries, love songs, hungry screams. Rushing through meadows full of sheep, their collective noise breaks out into individual notes. Unique voices amongst the hum, low bass rumbles and higher pitched sopranos joining together in a collective baa. There’s anger, indignation and alarm somewhere amongst the flock. And the joyful noise that springs from being part of a family.
Moving deeper into the country, the noise continues to grow, ears picking out new sounds, registering them and slotting them into an increasingly complex orchestra, categorizing, organizing and filtering. Trying to filter the right notes through to your conscious mind, while blocking out the background hum.
Sometimes the notes fall in certain familiar ways. My brain connects with its internal jukebox, I’ll remember a song, a snatch of verse, a chorus hook and I’ll carry those notes with me for several miles. A meditation played over and over, even when the wild orchestra around me has long changed its tune.
Notes and hooks and tunes are meditations. A focal point while the world transforms around you, shifting from one state to another. In the darkest days of one winter, the noise behind our doors had grown almost unbearable. A wailing rage overloading my brain with a white-hot heat. I latched onto the five repeating notes of a seventeenth century nursery rhyme. The city is burning to the ground. Ancient passages and alleyways an inferno. Water is pulled from the great rivers nearby, in the hope that the rickety slums can be saved. History tells us their efforts would be in vain. It would take the demolition of a ring of buildings around the fire to slow its pace and eventually allow ash to settle on unfamiliar streets. But the idea of water bringing salvation remains. Cooling fevered dreams.
I hum the song at the kitchen sink. In my head at first, and then quietly out loud. The noise grows around me like flames, insistent wailing shrieks and yells. But with each chorus round I find deeper wells of water to draw on. Cooling. Calming.
When the shouting’s over and the house is laid to ash, a part of my brain still hums quietly. Holding the song like a spell, ready to be sung again. Warding off dark spirits.
As the sun collapses over the horizon, the birds fall silent. Except the curlew, who cries through the night, keeping watch above his nest.