Adjust

An earache cure has muted the world. Starlings in masses pass overhead, unheard. The river deep makes silent waves. Soundless leaves shake from voiceless trees. Only a recoil crack of corrugated roof, a panel loosed in the night's storm, pierces the taciturn pod. Down by the water the wind blows darkly.

The old quarry wall is comprised, though it won't fall entirely for years yet. It's shale underfoot and could easily drop a lone walker into the rain swell of river. It is enough, today, to lose a familiar sense, adjust to a world with quieted starling hordes. The other path is trod, up and up, step by steep step, cumbersomely clambered, over the leaves that dropped, up while the wind blows the cloud over the valley, up to a mossed rock. Legs and ears at rest, eyes and brain roam the valley, the canopy, the lifting sky, a strangely melancholic riverbank.

Adjustments; the river flow represents; the altered path, the world without noise. There will always be things to be missed, always progression, and each of us is a tiny anchor, to hold what is good, to let the tide take the rest.