By the window

By the window where I sit I am always aware of the sounds from outside - more so when it's mild enough to leave the window ajar on its hook - and they have come to be an important part of my practice, somehow. Gradually I have come to tell myself less stories about them, but they are always there, as inevitable as my breathing, but more various.

 In summer there is birdsong - the blackbirds especially, and the inevitable magpies (if you  can call that song). In winter there isn't much except the chacking of jackdaws from their roost in the old water tower, and the occasional robin's episodic twitter. But there's always the traffic from the road at the end of the garden: the background shush (and splash if it's raining) of tires, recognisable engines - motorcycles (I have to try and avoid identifying these), buses, lorries - the occasional wail of a siren. Sometimes you can hear voices from the bus stop on this side of the road.

I always sit with my eyes closed, but I am aware of the light. I don't know if that's because, unconsciously, I remember what it was like when I sat down and set my timer, or whether I'm picking up the light through my lowered eyelids. I do have a sense, though, of the presence of the day around me, whether it's first thing in the morning or before supper in the evening. There's a clarity about that which reminds me of the season as well - bright sunlight at both ends of the day in summer, dimpsy in winter.

It's more than ten years now that I've been sitting in this particular window. Generations of birds have come and gone, the trees at the back of the garden are taller now - and one fell in a high wind earlier this year - and the shrubs have grown and changed. Leaves drift these November days across the lawn, building up around the bushes until they're cleared again. This place has become dear and familiar; there is a sense, almost, of the Benedictine quality of "stability of life", and these ordinary things have acquired for me something approaching sacredness - the more so because they are ordinary. There is nothing else I need.