The Sound of Silence

surprisingly noisy...

The first thing people say on arrival here is, ‘It’s so quiet!’ Sometimes they add, ‘How can you stand the silence?’ They usually lower their voices in hushed awe. For the most part, they are right to make this comment. Likely as not they will have arrived on a beautiful summer’s day when the sky is striped the blue and white of Cornish Blue pottery, the swallows are swooping and chittering, there is only the faintest breeze, and the sea is a glistening jewel just visible through the trees. They will have left the traffic jams of the narrow hedge-bound lanes behind them and entered a world where we are so seldom disturbed by uninvited humans that any unexpected visit, even the most benign, feels like an intrusion.

I smile and nod and agree it’s quiet, while inwardly grumbling, ‘You need to come in winter, mate.’ Today, for example, I woke to the sound of forty-mile-an-hour winds and the sea hurling itself at the cliffs in the most spectacular tantrum. Some weeks the wind is so persistent it’s as though you’re being shouted at non-stop.

Come to Cornwall and be blown away by its beauty

I have never before lived somewhere where the wind can whip the car door out of my grasp in the supermarket car park; where the rain is so dense it manages to get through the most comprehensive rainwear covering (aka waterproof trousers, wellies and a DryRobe - my current ensemble de choix from the Cornish Winter Look Book) and where it makes so much noise that at times I could swear it is raining inside the house.

And then there are my neighbours’ cows who like to make their presence felt of a morning:

Often the wind will drop in the evening and we’ll get the most spectacular sunsets. There is actually about half an hour of true silence then, when the world seems to hold its breath as it crosses the threshold from day to night. But once the owls start, and the badgers and foxes get going, we’re plunged back into a countryside concerto of chaos. Silence? Here? You must be joking.

A winter sunset over the fields

Last week I pulled a card from Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones deck that asked me to write about my experience of silence. I set a timer for five minutes and started much as I have in this post, but quite quickly I went to places of silence that have offered nothing like the experience of Cornwall at sunset - because the only times in my life that I have experienced true silence have been times of existential darkness.

I experienced this kind of silence sitting with Mum when she was so locked in with fear, drugs and sickness that she could not speak. Silence hung in the air for hours on end in a deep, black void while I willed myself to talk to fill it, knowing that if I didn’t I would scream. A similar silence has hung in the room when my husband and I have not been speaking to one another, or when we both need to speak, desperately, but the words won’t come. And then there was the silence after Dad took his last breath at dawn in the hospice, not even the tick of a clock to break it. And the silence of my childhood home on my last day there, sitting on the window sill in an empty living room, tears pouring silently down my face.

On reflection, I think what people really mean when they arrive at Boskenna is, ‘It’s so peaceful.’ There’s a peace here that can be felt right in the eye of the storm. I can stand outside in the fiercest winds and feel at peace. It’s the power of Nature in this place. It goes to my core, reassuring me that my troubles are insignificant, that they will pass, just as the storms will pass.

I used to hate the winters here. The rain and the mud and the wind and the wild, wild sea that prevented me from swimming. Now I love sitting in the kitchen, watching the weather come in over the sea, safe and cosy (now that we have central heating) and grateful for days that require nothing of me but acceptance. So yes, it is peaceful here.

But don’t ever tell me it’s quiet.

Moon rise over the sea