Did you know some theatre companies drop the last couple of pages of ‘Hamlet’, because they like Hamlet’s dying words, “the rest is silence” as the last line?
Silence is not necessarily death: it is not necessarily the end. Like most people, I am worried. I have relatives who might need ICU beds before the year’s out. I have a micro-business that won’t stand a quarter with no earnings, and bills to be paid. I could end up selling my house.
But between all the worries, I’ve spent hours – the time increases each day – reading people’s comments and articles about how we might change, and going outside and staring, simply, quietly staring at the sky. This is what it looks like today.
We have found out that we really can make things stop. We really can decide to do things differently, and get on with it. For a couple of years, I thought Occupy was the way, and involved myself in some of those actions – did you? Then I thought Corbyn’s Labour Party might be the way, and I involved myself in that – did you?
Have those things tragically gone away, to no good affect? I don’t think so – we have learned things. Please take the time, now, to digest the fact that we’ve just learned something else. We can make things stop. Here’s something to help fix the idea in our minds.
I live on the out-most circle of the aircraft pattern for the London airports (as do most people in the south east!) and my house sits on the ring-road of our small town (mysteriously, almost in the very centre of town). Usually, the prevailing noise, traffic, pretty much drowns out bird and breeze sounds. Usually, the sky is a crosshatch of aircraft trails, with a smog-grey 
streak somewhere near the horizon. This is what it looks like today…
I can’t show you, in a video, how that air smells – but I can show you the unbroken blue, and give you the sound. Please watch the video, then go outside and think about how silence may not be the end. Silence can be a thinking space, a learning space, a drawing of breath and a flexing of muscles, ready for…… what?
You decide.
Please keep talking to others – by any means you can, from zoom to yelling across a 2-meter spread of air in the street. Please keep thinking, please keep planning. We can do – whatever enough of us want to do.
Kay Green 
2 responses to “…the rest is silence”
A seer and Mystic by the name of Wellesley Tudor Pole said that the Sphinx (at Giza) holds the secret that Silence is the key to the Inner Temple.
A Scottish poet called William Sharp, who often wrote under the pseudonym of his feminine alter-ego Fiona Macleod, jotted down a ‘Triad’ spontaneously composed whilst visiting the ruins of Glastonbury Abbey in about 1904;
‘From the Silence of Time, Time’s Silence Borrow.
In the heart of Today is the word of Tomorrow.
The Builders of Joy are the Children of Sorrow ‘ *
* From ‘The Avalonians’ by Patrick Benham
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I do hope that after this (coronavirus CIVID-19) is all over, that things do not go back to business as usual and we learn nothing from our weeks of isolation…our escape from commercialism.
Here in New Zealand our lockdown is just beginning, from midnight last night only essential service personnel are working, although supermarkets and grocery stores are still open.
The last few days have been manic with panic buyers and last minute stocking up at supermarkets…including the occasional brawl as customers lost patience with their fellow customer or staff. I have been working as security on the doors of my local organic grocery store and thankfully the customers there have been very well behaved and realistic about what they were allowed – quantity wise – to purchase.
I really do hope that people take time to smell the roses and to contemplate life in general….and we come out the other side kinder to one another and kinder in our treatment of the planet.
Good luck and good health to you and yours…
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