Impish ideas

The sound of silence is cloaking my blog at the moment. I picture it silver and dense; you can step into the billowing clouds and sweep away sections to reveal forgotten words and pictures, and then the fog rolls back in, obscuring and hiding all the features.

But it’s not a desolate landscape – silver shimmers with possibility and is the colour of slow moonlight on dark water, the slanted light of illumination piercing through a shadowed forest. Ideas crouch, giggling – they occasionally stick a foot out into the circle of hazy grey and admire their shiny buckled shoes, their elongated silhouettes. Mostly they play a frenzied game of tag and will stop every so often to tug my clothes and whisper in my ear. They think me a great, lumbering thing – such a human! – but clap their hands like proud parents when I correctly interpret one of their hushed communications. They also hand-on-hips scold when I get it wrong and disapproval makes me slink away for a while, but their wild games call to me from beyond the stream. I always turn my head and listen.

Can you hear them too?

Girl Beside A Stream, Arthur Rackham