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Whale Song

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Walking past the harbour I heard a strange cry, sufficient to cause me to stop. It was repeated, then, several seconds later, for a third and final time. There was nothing visible on the surface of the sea and I couldn't tell how near or far the sound might have travelled over the still air. I looked around the harbour but there was nothing unusual. The sound was reminiscent of the cry of a whale?

I paused, before slipping down the steep road that led to the harbour, continuing forward to walk to the end of the large, solid pier that provided a clear view along the waters of the Sound and across the Minch to Skye. I was alone, existing in the brief moment between the ticking of time, caught in the void between one second and the next. Nothing moved. Silence. I was living in a pause, moving through the still life of a painting. The black woolly punctuations on the hill were motionless. The sea a solid sheet of rippled grey glass. Silence.

At the boundary between land and sea, I stood in the border between past and future. The present, that moment that is no sooner named than it is gone, had expanded. Instead of a line between adjacent numbers, it had stretched and spread into an ongoing experience of 'now'. Taking my camera from the breast pocket where it lay, I began to explore my surroundings, taking delight in the smallest detail and in the unexpected symbols that I found there. An infinite border of opportunities that had been heralded by the three strange sounds, a countdown to this present. The present gifted as a present.

Clarity. Silence. To live in this line on the ruler of time was to be at peace. I had made similar journeys to different borders before. This time, however, I had entered the border itself, explored its meaning, and returned smiling.

Three strange hoots had called me away from time, granting me the present of time...

Author, Peter Kerr

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

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