Not listening to Pan...

Sometimes it is far too hard to believe that everything is chance. Sometimes it might be better, easier, more exciting to believe that there is some great melody to be heard, played on the breath of some strange and frightening minstrel and that we all have a note to play in the tune. There are even moments when I almost hear his music, almost believe.

I was looking across the fields towards the sea a couple of weeks past when a hole appeared in the clouds and golden light shone down and through to the trees below. For a moment he almost had me as I nearly caught the sound of some deep tuned oboe on the breeze. I only just managed to not listen and ignore him, sternly reminding myself that it was a common and perfectly ordinary sight – hardly wonderful at all.

Then on New Years Day, blue skies, crisp, clear, early and fresh, standing outside our kitchen door and glancing up to the sky, I caught sight of a flock of lapwing, stark white and black, flying slowly overhead. Was that the low notes of a flute? ‘No’. I told myself ‘Just the sound of dozens of pairs of wings beating in the air, not music, just dull and quite usual’.

And I’m sure I almost thought I caught the drums of his travelling band one stormy evening late last November. The boom of kettle, the shish of snare, with and underneath the quivering notes of his reedy pipes. But it was just a storm, caught up in a web of sleep as I fell, not him at all, just the sound of thunder and a flash of lightening, the start or end of dream.

Everything is chance - but perhaps that’s how the music is made.