The silence of night

I was standing outside on the balcony yesterday, in the dark of the night and it occurred to me that the night has a different kind of silence. It is the silence of the stars and the horizon lit up with pale moonlight and the quiet stillness of trees ruffled by the faintest of breezes, and into this silence falls the faint sound of an insect buzzing, and the soft occasional tinkle of the wind chime like a gentle pluck on a sitar string and this dark silence accentuated by the coolness of the night laden with the promise of rain. How can I help but lose myself ?

Before I go to bed I go and stand in the balcony once more. This time the breeze wasn't blowing, so the trees were still and the wind chime was quiet. So the silence was deeper. But there was another beautiful sound. A lone owl was calling in the hills. 'Koo-koo' it called lustily. I read somewhere that the owl calls for a mate, therefore the sound was at once melancholy and hopeful. Hope must spring eternal in the owl's breast for sometimes I do hear an answering owl call. When two owls call in unison, the sound is so beautiful I stop still and listen. 'Koo-koo' one calls and 'koo-koo' another answers in a slightly different pitch. I wonder then that owls must pack a lot of meaning into those two syllables, they must be saying all that they have to say in varying pitches and tones. Who knows, maybe they even make themselves understood. And look at us humans, so many syllables in so many languages and so little understanding of each other, so little understanding even of ourselves. The moon is high in the sky now and so the starlight is a bit dimmed. I stand in the moonlight and bask in it and feel blessed.

Later on in the dead of night, I wake up. The silence is deepest now, even though the darkness is not. There is a tiny sliver of moonlight that escapes through a parting in the curtain and gives the room a tiny glow. And in the deep silence only a humming is heard, which could be the journey of blood in my ears. I feel tempted to remain awake and listen to the silence, but sleep overtakes me.

Zzzzzzz...............