In his dream, Aodhan chases something or somebody. His legs wiggle and kick. His head is heavy on my lap so I imagine it is full of dreams and each dream is a stone that turns into a leaf once he dreams it. My eyes are bright. There’s no moon. The sea woman sleeps as well. I feel the earth through my skin, all the earth. Because it is night and everybody sleeps now, the earth feels lonely. Earth doesn’t want to talk so lets me sit in this silence it creates when it does not want to talk. I look out over the water and assure the earth with my quiet. No song comes. No voice. The only sound is Aodhan’s legs brushing upon the stones and grass. I can see where he is running. It is the long path that divides the ocean from the bay. Entire trees wash up there after the storms tear them out of their root beds. We song children go out to them. We sit upon their bodies or we sit on the sand and lean our back against them. We feel their story through our skin. When we have come to know them, we receive their songs and stories and bring them to the fire where we share them. We share when we listen to the standing ones as well. The sea trees, though, tell us from other places.
I stroke Aodhan’s cheek with my hand as he sleeps. His breathing is quiet and steady like the waves below us on our cliff. The in, the out, the in, the out, the hush of changing in between. We can rarely see the change. Even so, we know it is happening. All things with the breath and even without the breath are changing. The is why we are among the walking ones. We have always been walking. Every world opens to us when we are walking. We each carry our songs and stories. We sing when we walk. We tell when we gather at the fire. Aodhan, the other song children, and I walk ahead. We sing the earth as it leads us, always with music, always with songs, songs we sing so we do not get lost. We are the ones entrusted. Where the song stops, we stop and look around.
While I am sitting here, the protector of Aodhan’s dreams, I sense the story approaching me. I press my lips together, the way I do because I find it helps me hear better if I am a little excited. This is what I do when I am excited. I know the sky sees my eyes squeeze shut. This is also the feeling of standing on the high rocks over the water when the wind is strong. I see the wind by letting it pressed my face. It has a form when it does that, it makes the shape of my face. I wonder where it carries it. I wonder who will see it and if the wind will show me their face, too. We never hear the story right away. When I feel this one after so much quiet in the earth, I feel my tummy grow tight and small. My breath changes to my listening breath. In my head, I whisper the music that comes. It is all so quiet. All so very, very quiet.
We are not ones to say we are too tired. The earth knows always that we have enough energy to receive a story or a song. It is all we are here to do. We can do other things. These are not the true tasks, though. These are things we do to eat. We have to eat because the earth wants us to live. It tells us where we find the deer and the bear, and sometimes it know where the rabbits have gone. The rabbits are the earth’s friends the way children are friends, always learning what nourishes and learning what harms. While all the other animals follow and listen, rabbits make everybody laugh, including the earth. When earth tells us where the rabbits are, we know we hunt our own laughter. All of it goes and comes. This is why we sing over every meal. I am thinking of eating when I see the story unfold.
My eyes are awake and can see the shapes in the story as they scroll upon the darkness. We are walking, all of us. We are following a song to a new land. When we are walking, the song stops deep inside the forest, and everyone is seeing, even the older. We understand that the song path that runs all through the earth and through us, the path that guides us, assures us, and we cannot see unless we follow until it goes quiet. To lose the song path is to bring everybody to a pause. It might be long. None of us move unless bidden by the songs that shape wilderness into music to show the way. It could be blamed on a song child if there were only one song child. This is why we have many song children. The earth goes quiet.
I feel this quiet. To feel this is to be so small. The quiet is a body part. It lives underneath the heart. I can feel it between the thumps that are like Cathasach’s drum when he lowers it into the river so the river can teach him, too. Each of us is always learning. Each of us makes these shapes and movements we learn. No other person can teach us this because none of us hold that kind of knowing, not the kind that makes one feel closer to Earth and someone else. What awful stories that would bring. I feel this as I view the air story that now unfolds in such vastness, I see how many the sea woman was telling me this would come, this would arrive when Aodhan is sleeping, when no one else opens by me. I do not close even though I would feel better if someone were with me. The Earth is with me, I tell myself. The Earth would not allow me harm. I think this and feel a warm breath upon my shoulder and the side of my face. I close my eyes so I can focus better on the story before me. The breath and warmth have sat beside me so I have Aodhan on one side of me and now Fiadh has come, too. I notice she has arrived just when I thought about my aloneness. Fiadh always know and always comes to me. We will carry this story together.
We have songs for arriving and songs for leaving, songs for rest and songs for task. We wear our songs like fur we have taken from the animals for the same reason we wear this fur. When you are singing you are warmed up. It is also like the animals because our songs feed us. It is impossible to be hungry when you are singing. It is difficult to be angry, too, when the person you feel this anger towards when you are singing together a song given to you both by the earth. We recall what binds us when we sing. We stay current instead of drifting into something that happened moments ago. The earth is always now. Just now. All of it happening at once.
Aodhan wakes to my and Fiadh’s singing. We are now three song children. We hold the story as well. The story of the forest and the silence of the earth that keeps us there. The silence of the woods is music now. They stillness of us is now words. This is how we gather. This is how we have always gathered, not only as people, but as earth and tree, wolf and loon.
We are changing, too, though. We don’t know what we are changing into. This way of life is a waiting way of life. We breathe when we wait. We breathe when we stop looking ahead to where we are going and looking behind to where we have just left. Waiting means stillness and permanence. When we wait, we feel the earth teaching us the quiet lesson. It is the lesson of the listening. When the music returns to us, we know the many darknesses are placing something inside us we must be still and silent to hold. The forest shimmers with it when it returns. All the leaves face up.