Photo at Pixabay

I took my after-dinner amble beneath a clear sky this evening. I regularly walk a short stretch of road, sandwiched between two high drystone walls, that’s so dark at night I’m always mildly fearful, and my pace quickens.

But there’s sight, tonight, of a new crescent moon. And there’ll be another frost, so Clematis Rebecca has been tucked up in her fleece. And those two facts may help you to picture the night sky, the sharp, twinkling clarity I’ve just seen, above the dark corridor. And maybe you have experienced the absence of aforementioned mild fear that is a ready – even if temporary – consequence of awe?

Life is rich beyond all our imagining. When our vain fears and fantasies chatter daily, like monkeys, within the halls and chambers of our minds, the Universe provides the gift of a quietening, a stilling, an acceptance of both knowing and unknowing, faith and the absence of it, confidence and a tempter’s call to doubt.

I think of one (and many before him, and since) who ventured out into a dark corridor of wilderness long ago. And of his mental busyness being silenced, then, by the same stars that have silenced me tonight. And I imagine his being sometimes comforted, in his long sojourn there, by both awe and silence. And I am.