3 Sri Lanka (Back in the Hills)
May 29, 2022

45 The Deadly Pine Forest

Sitting in the pine forest at dawn with the strong rays of the sun coming through the trees: as they fall the dew of the night evaporates and there is a light mist in the air. Some of the pines on the branches have died and turned golden and red, while others on the same branch live on, and the needles are caught in the rich light of the early morning. As I sat here one day an emerald winged dove flew by, and it’s strong, straight and silent flight was a moment of beauty in this place. The pine forest is planted as a monoculture and there’s a certain spaciousness about it, with the trees planted at an equal distance one from the other, which also gives it a certain airiness. The needles when they fall are poisonous, and there is, consequently, little other vegetation – and so no insects, no birds, and no animals either. There has been a fire in the forest recently, and the black ashes lie about making the place look even more desolate.

I come here at odd times when I feel like a walk, and as one leaves the jungle path behind it becomes deadly quiet and even one’s footsteps sound hollow. Unlike a more varied and interdependent environment it’s as though there were no morning noon or night here, but simply a monotonous silence, the silence and lack of change that one associates more readily with death than with life.

There is more than one kind of silence and people often mistake the silence of death, which is invariably man-made, with the silence that gives life. In a man-made environment, psychological or physical, any and everything outside of the plan becomes an intrusion, an interruption, and must be rooted out and destroyed, and there is a constant struggle to control. But the silence of life doesn’t deny multiplicity – indeed, it is the very quality that allows things to be, it is the very ground of being, and when one is touched by this silence all resistance to multiplicity, to change, to life and death, falls away, and there is an openness born of faith that allows one to partake of these things and no longer be divided, it is no longer a problem because one sees that things are not separate from the underlying reality but arise on it.

In that realisation is an end to the conflict of always wanting to be other than what we are, the ending of the denial of our very humanity, of our creatureliness, and so we are at one again – with God, with ourselves, and with creation in all its abundance and variety.

there is nowhere to go
and nowhere to be but here
so why not relax
and be present to what is

no movement of denial
no holding what is passing
simply being true and
truly being simple

this is the best place to be
all life has led up to it
so why not trust the moment
let tomorrow come when it will

when there is only here and now
then what else is there?
breathing, sensing, being
and the immense silence beyond
– isn’t that enough?

46 The Birds in the Hills