We may live very busy lives, full of places to go, people to see, and anxieties that weigh upon our minds, nature is constant and reassuring. A walk in the woods is a salve for the soul, and the most beautiful music in the world is that composed by rustle of leaves in the trees, stirred by a breeze. Soothing and mysterious, it calms us and reminds us that the whispering melody, subtle and changeable, is a quiet anthem, giving us information and reminding us that we are alive.
The rustle of leave is a constant in our lives. We have heard it as we walked home from school as children, and when we went for a run to burn off some calories in middle age. We have heard it during quiet moments on park benches, when we contemplated something in our lives – a break-up, a success, or simply the joy of a quiet moment in the park with a coffee or a sandwich at lunch. We have heard the whispering rustle of the leaves in our travels – on any continent, a stroll or a moment of idle reflection was always accompanied by the flow of the air, made real and symphonic by the trees around us.
And so the rustle of the leaves is constant for us – a whispered reminder of our humanity, our connection to nature. It is a sound of portent, for we only really hear it when we are listening to ourselves – our thoughts, our feelings, and the story of our memories.
My father put it best once, as we were walking through the woods, north of Toronto in the Hockley Valley. We sat down on a stump and ate our BLT sandwiches, sipping coffees from little steel cups. We were quiet for a while, then he asked me: “Do you hear that?” I replied yes, of course. He said that it was his favourite sound in the world, and eager to understand a piece of the puzzle of my father’s life, I asked why. His answer was simple:
“Because it was the song of my childhood.”