Tag: duty

🎼 I make noise ðŸ’¡

The noise I make, I make by being alive. The footprints of the sounds I make are small.

I breathe, I talk, I cry, I sleep. I never stop making sounds. The sounds I make have small footprints.

I make sounds. Most of the sounds I make as notations in music are rest notes.

The sounds are the sounds of not making sounds. My silences are my companions. My companions are usually invisible.

I know them, my companions, from the first moments I made sounds to and for myself. I heard them with the ears of my ears, outside in the brightly lit, open green fields of my youngest childhood.

The sounds I make can be put down in musical notation. Most are rest notes with limited significance. These rest notes reach my ears. I process them, interpret them, hold hands with them,

The noises I have made throughout my life is a musical score, indiscernible as music. I have produced a few grace notes, which rise above the score. They have a wider footprint. I hang my grace notes on twigs. They sound pretty as I pass back and forth through the forest.

My musical score is like all the other music produced by my fellow beings. My fellow beings are mostly small winged insects. They outnumber human beings. The sounds they make with their wings are their constant companions. These sounds are mostly inaudible to me.

My fellow human beings move. The sounds they make alert me to the Sun, to the Moon, to the seas, to all the things growing in the wide open airs under the vaulted blue skies.

All my days, the music I have made, I make without desiring to create anything. The noises that issue from movements in and from my body are reminders of the energy I release through breathing, thinking, feeling.

I see now there is a music composed of rest notes, white noise, the occasional pure musical tones. These sounds, my constant companions, remind me of my responsibility to try and make harmony out of random.

If I know it, or if I know it not, I have a sacred duty when I open my mouth to hum, or whistle, or speak, or when I look across in silence into the eyes of another. 

My responsibility is simple. It is to be in harmony with the energy I draw on when sounds issue from me.

When I am walking on the grass, among trees, on hillsides, on uneven ground close to streams, with the wind in my face, and my feet are placed and placed by my own volition, the energy of my movements is as the energy of light from the almost imperceptible dance of fireflies.

The footprint of the light I create as I move through the natural world is not large. My light is my companion and it is my sole responsibility.

All my long life, it is my light that silently accompanies every instant of my waking thinking dreaming existence.

If I know the light, or if I know it not, now I understand it is with me always. It asks nothing of me, because it is me.

The light is my legacy. I must know that the light I produce has unlimited impact. My light will reveal my purpose, my integrity and the extent to which my harmonious self makes music in my heart

~ Love is present EveryNow

Miz Maze & Breamore

near the Miz Maze

Breamore and Miz Maze – some lines in praise

Breamore is one of my favourite places in Dorset.

The charm of the place name of Breamore is that it will never get to be pronounced as it appears on paper, neither today, nor tomorrow, and this is how the locals would have it, as it always has been from times immemorial.

To a person who walks with receptivity and who has eyes to see, there are still surface characteristics, and traces of the workings and the worship by seasonal routines of the earliest settlers on these fertile furlongs.

Relics can be discerned of the nurture and respectful land management from their effect on the ground of ancient legs and hands, and in the way the landscape has been allowed to roll and unfold, as well as in the disposition of the extant flora, in particular the avenue of Yew Trees.

This view in my photo has none of the trees in question. I slid under barbed wire and down a bank to take this panorama about a hundred yards from the line of the Yew enclosed track.

They will all have been planted as borders along at least a mile of footway leading gently uphill to the Breamore Miz Maze, one of England’s eight surviving Neolithic turf mazes.

Though these Yews seen today are sadly disrespected, for the lack of people purposed with their health and well-being, each one in their ground-holding today stands witness to their continuous presence throughout centuries gone by.

Those days are long ago to our kind. The noble Yews count out time at four blinks-a-year. They remember when enough hands were living hereabouts to manage and maintain them.

Those ordinary land workers followed the path of working traditions established through customs of usage by their forebears, who had in their turn devoted part of their time to their duties to the Yew Trees.

These rites of care they performed alongside their other work out of respect for the wisdom of the folklore passed down from the ancients who had lived with the awe that the natural and magical and mystical properties of the Yew Trees inspired.

Any sapling requires a minimum of protection to survive on its way to maturity. Some of the trees along here are these days in a pitiably broken, delapidated state.

Nor you nor I need arboriculture to recognise neglect and disrespect where casual damage and overclimbing brambles are evident.

There are many full grown yews here. I see them as statements of ancient human will. Decision makers a long time ago intended them to be growing here, each in its place on either side of this thoroughfare, perhaps in perpetuity, as they would have had it in their minds’ view.

I see them in their shaded orderly procession as contrasted to the acres to the east and west whose unbroken flatness was created by machine under the will of other, more modern minds.

The lines in the landscape are still available to be seen. They are so empty and silent of oxen, of horse, and of men in their hardy boots, coarse-cloth clothes, head caps and gruff chit-chat.

In their landscape I believe I still see where they took themselves, one after the other on their working ways, mornings to and evenings from, season after season.

Every place of habitation, shelter for beast or man, place of veneration, memorial or worship, every roadbend, hillcrest, stream, dugout or hillock visible today were joined by footsteps following footsteps in lines of service and daily sacrifice.

I see time’s imprint all over these lands, either by design, or by default of neglect or disregard for the ancient patterns.

The land shapes are often readable marks, interpretable very much like the notes on an old music score. Here is pattern, rhythm, glory, major chords of root, and upthrust of choral gladness in the Sun’s light. Here too is destruction, cynical trashing that clashes a terrible dissonance against the greatness of this year’s delicate greening.

Wide open I pass by, and where I can pause my footfall on a noiseless day, I am like to hear the past speak up from the earth. I am with the people whose blood and bones it once nourished.

They are me. I am they. 

It is a simple, and often extremely poignant exchange of recognition, gratitude and kinship performed walking alone and in silence.

A brief study of the specialist maps which list ancient monuments, Neolithic and other earthworks, and Roman to Victorian road and field boundaries, is most revealing of the vast bustle of noises from beyond the past. Empty now of sound.

Love’s presence

The Breamore Miz Maze is one such place where lines of connection, ceremony and duty converged and do still converge, even if the lines today are carrying the feet of the curious, the nostalgic, the dog-walkers and the occasional intrepid lovers!

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