Arnayon is a very small, almost deserted village in the south

of France. It is twenty miles from the nearest main road and ten

miles from the nearest minor road, at the end of a long valley.

A shepherd and his wife are the only people that live there all

the time. A few visitors come and stay in the three or four habitable

houses rented out to tourists.

I stayed there with Stef a long time ago.

Arnayon is so quiet. After a few days of being there I came to

think that the quiet, the silence of the place, was a living thing.

It felt like it was pressing on me . . . . . .

Arnayon was so quiet, I could stand at the crossroads and hear

the wind rippling through the tail feathers of a hawk, hovering 40

feet above me.

I had been practising Constancy, (more on that later). I felt ready to burst.

One day, I had just finished my early morning ritual of grinding

coffee beans whilst sitting on the terrace of our little stone farmhouse,

when the quiet felt even more powerful than before.

I closed my eyes and was instantly swept away. . . . .

I felt very far away from everything. I was in some warm but grey

and neutral place, without a single distinguishing feature.

it was not like a grey room, or being inside a grey fog. . . .

It was nothing,

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . nothing at all.

At some great distance, I could just make out a terrified

voice calling out, calling out to me. It was screaming over

and over again:

"I want to come back

I want to come back right now!"

It was my voice. It was me calling. And then I thought,

if that is "me" calling from over there, who is hearing

that voice here? At that moment I heard and felt a deep

rich laughter all around "me". I could sense someone

very close, though I could see nothing except the greyness.

The laughter was frightening, and "my" voice calling from the

distance became hysterical and frantic. The laughter stopped,

but I could still feel this presence. It was an older male, who

knew me and everything about me, who was hugely amused

by my discomfort yet I felt no cruelty in his manner. I did not

know how I knew these things but I felt them with a completeness

more certain than anything else I had ever known.

Within a second, I was back, staring across the valley at the long

shadows of the trees, listening to the shepherd's dog barking.

A sound that made the living silence somehow even more profound.

The shadows had not moved, the sheep crossing a distant field had

gone but a few feet. I had been "gone" for seconds but it felt like hours.

In the second that I was returning from the Silence to the terrace at our

farmhouse, I knew whose laughter that was. It was "me" laughing.

I had no idea how such a thing was possible . . . . . . . . but I was

determined to find out.