Utter stillness is not complete silence.
The absolute absence of sound is tense. Unnatural. Oppressive.
Utter stillness, rather, is wind. Moving air over a rippling green lake. The drifting hiss of invisible breakers crashing into ranks of sun-warmed firs. There are games being played, in the trees, behind me. Children, dogs… But here, facing nothing but a vast space of water, relentlessly marching, never seeming to arrive, and beyond it, row upon row of vigilant evergreens, charging up the slopes to cling like barnacles to the leathery grey bones of the earth - reared, twisted skeleton of upheavals past, millennia-slow ripples from the breath of God on the stony skin of the planet.

And all this world is swallowed by that whisper of wind.

Utter stillness is the immobile, infinitesimal decay of life encrusted rock…
Wind moving pebbles….until a mountain is a riverbed.

The wind strips all sound, and, for a moment, all memory of any moment besides this one.Strips me to nothing…not to nakedness, but to stillness. Emptiness. It leaves me here, a one sided spruce. A rock face.