Carol Mackay Mertz

again one of those truisms…we are all connected to the web of life.

It has been some time since I wrote last. It seems counter productive to add my voice to the cacophony of sound that is our reality today. I need to be moved greatly these days to add my voice in a responsible manner.

Today was that day.

After dinner, we took a short walk. What we noticed almost immediately after leaving the house filled with air conditioners, and fans was the absolute silence of the outdoors.

Absolute…silence.

There were no sounds to catalogue, no voices of our neighbors, no dogs, birds, goats, chickens, lawnmowers, cars, trucks, road noise drifting over the mountain from I81, no train whistles from Luray, and no insect noises. Insects and birds are almost never silenced except in the case of intrusion into their environment.

Months or weeks ago I would have posed the question, what is happening? Tonight I simply marveled at this unprecedented moment of time out of time, of silence as a flow of life all around us.

So for the past few years of Covid induced at-homeness, I have been rereading novels that I have read before. So I know the plot lines, I know what happens in the end, I know that the current angst that the hero and heroine are going through is eventually solved, overcome, and that they level up to a higher appreciation of life. I just enjoy the show as it unfolds without engaging my own angst and worry over the ultimate outcome of the novel.

I like knowing the ending….some would say it’s a terrible personality trait. I also know that I am not the only one who indulges in reading the end of a book before reading the middle. I still wonder what it is in me that just wants to know the ending….especially when there is really NO ending for any of us in life. Life always goes on.

As human beings, we have been given a tremendous responsibility to ensure that humanity makes it to the next level of life and evolution.

Some days I see humanity rising to the challenge and other days, it just sucks to be human. Then there are the days when impossibly excellent circumstances arise as incredibly rare events that we get to witness and remember. They are gifts from the soul.

Today… this evening of silence was one of them for me.

Recently in my darkest doubts of myself, my soul’s voice has been whispering, “ Everything is going to turn out well.” And for once in my life, I believed that voice. I took comfort from that insistent voice which kept repeating the same phrase.

And I felt as though my soul could see around that blind curve in the road, as though all of my worries and self doubts could be seen from another vantage point, as if my soul had skipped to the end of the novel and could see the last moments of this life and was excited to report that even I was happy with the results!

So when miracles happen, it’s nice to know we can appreciate them. There was also a rainbow on the far ridge starting to form. It was an exclamation point to the silence.

When I was a child I never thought I would get excited about silence and rainbows, but that was Chapter One, back in the day as they say…there are more chapters of life to come. It is a pretty exciting time to be on planet earth, and we have not nearly reached the end of the novel or the silence.

More to come…more to the interconnected web of life than we ever dreamed…

Peace be with you, friend.