The silence here is different from that I have known elsewhere. The only thing I can compare it to is that great quiet found deep in the woods, early in the morning. But even that is something different. On a perfectly still day, when the birds are silent and those rowdy chipmunks are absent, the woods are silent, but it is somehow a closed silence. You are in the middle of something, you are surrounded by trees and plants that help to muffle any small sounds there are. In Mokhotlong there is an open silence. It is the quiet of empty space, cold air, and hard stone. It isn't quiet because the sounds can't be heard, it is silent because the sounds aren't there! However, that absence of sound doesn't quite give the feeling of lack that is does other places. It's not that sounds are missing, it's sort of like the quiet in a great cathedral: that silence has a sort of fullness and richness all it's own.
It is that great time between late afternoon and early evening, it is not bright out anymore, but it still a half hour before twilight. My most vivid memories of childhood summers are at this time. Running around and playing with friends during those final minutes of the day when you can feel and see the world around you changing. After a whole day in which each minute seems the same as the next, being outside during this time brings me back into meaningful contact with this slowly turning pile of rock. It is that slow and perpetual motion manifest; when you can watch that orange globe climb down behind the horizon. You know it was moving just like that all day, but somehow those last minutes seem more important. On a bad day it comes with a sigh of relief and a sense of closure. All that nastiness that was this day, you are reassured, is almost out of the way and there's really no more time to fit anything else bad in. On a good day it can be that sigh of satisfaction like after a good meal. That time where you sit at the table, unconcerned with the dirty dishes, the chores to attend to to clean up after today and get ready for tomorrow. When you just sit there content and look over the results of your good fortune and hard work and are happy simply appreciating how good all that was!
The little peaceful world outside my door grows dim, and my face is lit by the glow of this computer screen. Somehow my perceptions have begun to shift, and nowadays this polarized electric glow now seems more eerie and out-of-place than candlelight. The silence is not complete, the great thing about this kind of quiet is that you can hear for farther than one ever thought possible. I can hear the chatter and murmur of kids playing, somewhere. They could be talking and laughing anywhere within a half-mile of me, and I can hear them. It makes it a little magical, disembodied voices and sounds of play. You know the voices have owners, but it makes it much easier to reminisce, half imagining those as the sounds of you and your own playmates, just now floating down to murmur over you from over the mountains and across twenty years, like a little stream, washing and rippling past your bare feet, full of water that made it's slow journey through river and cloud and mountain only to be there just when you need it, to rinse the dirt from between your toes.
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