When a writer starts writing about nature I stop reading. I don’t know why but I get switched off quicker than a fish jumping in a still pond on a clear morning. My nature is impatient and hungry – my mind suspicious. But God help me this morning when I went down to feed the horses there were two geese on the lower pond screeching away at the top of their voices. They must have been at it a full five minutes before they flew off together in full squawk. The horses took it all in stride. They are used to the neighbors – life in the field by the pond. It was not so easy for me. The light was low and clear – the reflection perfect. The vibrant valley an echo chamber for the crisp sharp sound. My eyes filled with tears.

I know I had been brought to the doorway – squawked into awareness – to that place of sweet life, of completeness and presence. I stood in that threshold looking out past the house of my self, my busy mind, my foolishness. I stood there looking out into this other world – the one that lives inside this one.

The thing is that the silence is the silence. The pond is pond. The sky is sky and I am just I and language has no function or value here unless it returns to sound – to its vibrational roots – to squawk, plonk and splash – to all the ripples of echo and murmur, all the way back to the infinite vibration of silence. Language has to become wordless, present, embraced by now – any naming or description a violation of access, a breaking of the covenant – any separation an absurdity.

I too have no function, no value , no meaning more than a squawk or a plonk or a splash. There is no place for art, no concept, no ideology here. If we frame it or give it value the door slams shut and we are back in the lab, in the studio, in the study, in the church. Back in our delusion closed off from access. The more we theorize and talk and postulate the more that door becomes a wall – a wall of ignorance and hubris – a death sentence – a slow burn in the fire of our adherence to our uniqueness and separateness.

Those squawking geese meant no rebuke, they were just in the truth and exuberance of their utterance. There is no cure for our dilemma. Why should there be, we make no sense, and our destructive ways will be balanced out and forgotten over time. We make our own loneliness – we break our own hearts. We will run out tears. The doorway right there, the invitation written in the laws of the universe.