The Night Speaks with its Silences

JOURNAL ENTRY

27th November, Thursday

This morning,
 The kingfisher wakes
 To a softer, kinder day.

The willow leaf
 Finds the current
 That I cannot see.”

[MUSIC]

WELCOME

The air, tonight, is heavy with damp and there is a raw stirring breeze that chills and nips at ears and nose. The canal surface is ruffled and the ducks are keeping out of sight. 

This is the narrowboat Erica narrowcasting into the darkness of a late November night to you wherever you are. 

You have managed to make it. It is so good to see you, I was hoping you'd come. Come into the warm. The stove is glowing in the corner, pull up a chair and warm your bones beside it. The kettle is on the boil; the biscuit barrel is on the side. Mind your head while you come down the steps and welcome aboard.

[MUSIC]

NEWS FROM THE MOORINGS

November is tipping into December.

 Under skies of ash of yesterday's fires, the canal is framed in late autumn’s muted colours – muddy taupe, deep cavernous greens faded by wind and sun, a haze of undecided grey. Some dull days, the colours pop. On others, they appear bleached and blanched, faded by the celebration of the season’s dance. Like the coloured plate-pictures in aged books that used to belong to Mum when she was a child. But they are colours, nonetheless, and I love them. Of course, it only needs a bit of sunshine to transform the day. The sparse-leafed, spikey hedgerows glow with the deep port of the remaining hips and haws. Ducks clamber out onto the bank and doze on the sun-warmed brick of the culvert. And the glossy ivy leaves shine bright. But days of unpainted skies and a watery light suit me fine too. They somehow seem to meet the mood of this time of year. The gentle withdrawing. As with me, at this time, what matters now, is what is happening unseen. The time to restore and attend to the interior not the exterior. Our worlds gently close in around us, with the gathering darker days. For them, what is important is what is happening below ground. They know this and use the time well. I am still trying to fight the cultural torrent, and learn it and practice it too.     

Boots hang heavy with towpath mud. Smoke clouds of old man’s beard billow, mingling with the ashy grey of willowherb whisps, hanging in the damp air like the desultory trails from a cadged cigarette. Gulls rise on hectoring winds and blade the granite grey cliffs of cloud. Like ducks, the flying skills of gulls are shockingly overlooked. There is something of the skilled poise of a professional ice dancer about them. From time to time, the rooks all lift off a neighbouring field en masse, to the applause of jackdaws’ cheers. What is it about jackdaws when I see them with groups of crows or rooks (which is a lot) that I immediately think of slightly over-enthusiastic fans and hangers-on who have been granted a backstage pass for the very first time?

Even the dimmest of gloomy days lights up with the spark of a blue pilot light as the kingfisher flits from branch to branch and then fender to fender in front of me. We had our first freeze over this week. Mercifully for the kingfisher it lasted only a couple of hours. But it was enough to remind me – although in truth, I didn’t need reminding – of the vulnerability of this little soul to our weather.  

[MUSIC]

CABIN CHAT

[MUSIC]

THE NIGHT SPEAKS WITH ITS SILENCES

We are nearly at the shortest day. Right now, in the UK, two thirds of our day is darkness. The daily incremental increase is slowing as we near the top of the arc, but it doesn’t feel that way. Each day, the daylight feels a little shorter, night-time nibbles at the ragged edges of dawn and dusk, and loiters in the shaded nooks and neglected spaces where branches hang low and rabbits furtively scurry.

At these times of the year, night never seems to fully go away. It lurks in corners of your eye and is there in the play of light and shadow flickering across the towpath and city park. You can feel its breath upon your neck, a pace or two behind you.

I know I have read this before, but farmer and poet Tom Hennen expresses it so well in his collection Darkness Sticks to Everything:

[READING]

I can understand why it is now – and not later in the true depth of winter – that our ancestors lit the early winter skies with great sparking flames of fire. And why we do still today. More often the sparkle and blaze are generated by electricity and coloured LEDs, but the effect is the same… and the desire is the same, too. Despite many years of experience, it all still does have a rather one-way journey feel about it.

Then I came across a wonderful Substack written by someone I follow on Bluesky (I am meeting so many incredible writers and artists there). The writer also lives on a narrowboat and shares a deep connection with the natural world in which she lives. She writes with her soul, and it’s wonderful. Her name is Jen Ratcliffe and her Substack is called Mess in a Boat. Moreover, she includes a narrated audio version of her articles which work as a gorgeous podcast – and one which, if you enjoy this one, you will fall in love with immediately. I have included the link in the programme notes below.

Her latest article struck such a cord with me. She begins:

[READING]

I too share that surprise and shock. Each year it comes. Each year I listen to the crows’ evensong rolling across the fields earlier and earlier. Each year, I seem to forget this tidal-race of darkness rushing into my day. Each year, I am surprised by the way my body and my mind so tangibly respond to this cycle of gathering darkness and night. And, also, I am beginning to notice, my increasing impatience and lack of tolerance with this drive to deny the very reality of life. The demand to try to unbend the circle, to flatten it straight. To convince our bodies and minds that nothing changes and to try to fool ourselves by filling the night with artificial light and the winter-chill with artificial heat. There are no seasonal rhythms, every day is a T-shirt day. Every day ends when we turn off the light. It's not surprising we feel so lost and so adrift. We have been tricked into believing that cutting loose our anchors will give us liberty and control, when it is actually the reverse.

As much as I relish the coming of spring, I also relish the coming of the long nights and I seem to crave and require them more and more. To let the horizons of my world draw in for a while. To create a nest and to let the stillness and silence of the night talk to me and restore my balance. To remember that like the plants and trees I meet every day, at this time of year, what matters most is hidden from sight, underground; root-level. To find my place once more and most of all to be reminded of wonder and awe. This sense of closing in, as Nic Wilson so astutely observes in her column in which she shared her experience about night times in her local woods, is in no sense a diminishing or reducing. It’s an opening, a doorway set ajar, to allow us to remember deeper, wider things that we can too often miss in the blaze of day light and the activities it so often brings.

Appearance of the stars – even in the bleached wash of the semi-suburban night skies around here. Standing on the hill, looking up, waiting for Orion to rise. Watching the arcing swing of the Great Bear and the Plough and Cassiopeia has sometimes been genuinely dizzying. That reeling feeling of vertigo. And I am once more reminded that I am living on a tiny blue and green globe spinning in infinity and that this life I am living is a miracle of wonder. Our beautiful chaotic lives, filled with so many fears, and lived out with such a frantic turmoil of private despairs and dreams – all of this is nurtured by a small spinning planet that is racing around a star which gives us life, and which in turn is strung on an outer arm of the whirling spiral of a galaxy that, if you are lucky on a clear dark night, lights a milky star-path across the sky.

These are the silent stories of night. But there are more.

Just think. Since exactly one year ago, you have travelled 584 million miles to complete one circle of the sun at a speed of 67,000mph. And all the time, you’re also spinning at around 800 mph. But again, it doesn’t stop there, for we and our small sun and the collection of planets we know so well, are also hurtling through space at 514,000mph as part of one of the spiral arms of the Milky Way and travelling in just one year 4.5 billion miles of space. And if we still feel jaded, the Milky Way is taking us all on a journey towards a group of galaxies called the Great Attractor …. at a speed of over 1million 177 thousand mph.

You and I have travelled so far!!

The night tells us very different stories to those our ancestors heard in its silence. But the nett result is much the same. The generation of awe, a sense of the scale of our lives, the capacity to sense beyond the mundane concerns and frustrations and touch deeper, unspoken truths that can only be felt and never fully spoken. 

We live our lives sharing an amazing planet. It is no wonder that we are born to wonder and that its loss fills us with a sense of lostness and dis-ease, or that so many now fill their hours in the lonely distractions of the forlorn light of glowing screens.

Many years ago, I bought a book on astronomy that helped you navigate your way around the night sky – something I was, and am still, pretty hopeless at. It was Chet Raymo’s An Intimate Look at the Night Sky. It wasn’t what I was expecting from a book crammed with helpful diagrams, and sky atlases. It took my breath away. Rather than the text being full of complex statistics and formulae and abstruse terminology, I was met with writing of breathtaking beauty. All the information was there, but so too was poetry, as sense of contemplation and of wonder and beauty. In fact, at first, I was not sure what to do with it and so it stood on my bookshelf beside the Collins and other guides to the sky and celestial charts. As I grew older, I began to be drawn more and more to the heart of this book. It is still with me, one of the few that have made it onto the little bookshelf on board the Erica.

Scientist, naturalist, writer, I came across another of his books, The Soul of the Night (NOT Night of the Soul as I say!!), when we were moving onto the boat. It is a collection of his essays on the theme of the night. It was a fortuitous find, as this was also the time I began this podcast. It also is a thing of beauty, finding melody in the language and concepts of astronomy and physics and lyrically weaving them into the deep existential themes and questions of the common life. The essay with which he begins his collection sticks with me the most.

Here are some excerpts from it.    

[READING]

And these days filled with night are filled with such promise and their silent stories call to a hunger deep within. As Tom Hennan perceptively writes, “At night I dissolve.”

And what a wild and magnificent thing to dissolve into.

SIGNING OFF 

This is the narrowboat Erica signing off for the night and wishing you a very restful and peaceful night. Good night. 

WEATHER LOG