I’ll tell you how the sun rose, —
A ribbon at a time.
The steeples swam in amethyst,
The news like squirrels ran.
The hills untied their bonnets,
The bobolinks begun.
Then I said softly to myself,
“That must have been the sun!”

Emily Dickinson

There’s sometimes a deep silence at the heart of a daily walk: the silence of natural elements fallen and becoming. The silence in colours changing before one’s eyes. The silence of flight, and of the omnipresent mountain, the placid cow, or horse, or flock of sheep. The silence of the hawthorn hedge because the air is now still. The silence of memory and of tomorrow. And there’s often a silence just beneath the surface of my slight breathlessness: and it’s the classroom where I keep on learning who I am: and sometimes I say softly “That must have been the sun!”