TKG Take Ten : Barn animals do not suffer from insomnia.

Monday - This barn is over a hundred years old: in the winter it is COLD. So all my sensible animals put themselves to bed early. Then sleep. Though animals sleep with one ear open, they sleep hard.

The sun is not yet down in this video but if you listen super carefully you will hear the snores of hogs. The rustle of a chicken, the breath of a cow.

I almost did not bring this TKG Take Ten to you today because it is SO quiet that you will have to turn your sound up full bore to hear anything at all. And often there is nothing. Is this too esoteric? It feels drunk. Unmoored. Too different.

Those creaks, are they a cow shifting, or the barn settling? No wind. No wild birds. The constant absence of sound becomes a song. It opens us. Like a huge unhurried solitary breath. A sharpening of our sound sensors.

The sheer optimism of actively listening to a sleeping barn with only the slightest intimation of sound every now and then is so beautiful - it is like performance art. The art of tableaux. But without the tableaux, or the art or much of anything for that matter. I am very attracted to it. It is the essence of peace. Whispers just out of our hearing.

All we really see is the pink of the sunset getting softer and softer as the day disappears. And it is so far to the left of the screen that it feels like an afterthought. A tiny window. Mostly this is about allowing our ears to search. To open to those sounds. To hear spirits in their corners.

And then right at the end you will hear me coming. Walking carefully through the dark barn - announcing myself from afar, Boo at my heels, singing to the pigs and hogs and cows and the chickens and Mr Flowers the peacock so they don’t get up. So no-one gets a fright and everyone knows where everyone is and that it is sleeping time and that all is well.

I love the barn at night.

Celi

We are coming to the end of your Free Trial Period of TKG Take Ten.

I would love you to consider joining The Tenners now; by upgrading.

From February 25 - TKG Take Ten will only be FREE on Sundays and (some) Wednesdays. Upgrade at any time for the full 5 days a week of the farm or travel experience. Just $5 a month. Because! Drum Roll! Starting on the 21st of March we have almost two months of travel to Canada and Australia and New Zealand. (All with one carry on!). And you are invited!