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Important Things

There was once a street, it was a long street and at the end there was a house. And in this house there was a great deal of noise.

The noise did not come from the people living there, it came from the house itself, or rather everything within it.

For there was an argument being raged inside; an argument about important things.

You see, two people, who were young and in love, had recently come to live in the house. And as the house knew that lovers starting out on a new adventure need a beautiful home for their love to grow, it was trying to decide which of it’s gifts were the most valuable.

Like many problems to do with houses, the trouble had started with the roof:

‘I am so excited,’ it had said. ‘That new couple must be so pleased to be under me. After all it so often rains here, so I must be very important to them.’

‘Huh,’ said the walls. ‘You talk so high... er, well you are high,’ it floundered, ‘but only,’ it recovered quickly, ‘because we hold you up there. Where would you be without us? Huh? Tell us that!’

‘Oh quiet,’ said the roof, ‘you know I am the most important. Why without me you’d be… you’d be… a swimming pool!’

‘Well... well, without us,’ the walls sneered back, ‘you’d only be a floor!’

‘Oi,’ said the floor, not a little put out, ‘what d’yer mean ‘only a floor’ - who do yer think yer standing on, yer over-grown bit of hardboard. Give a block a bit of fancy wall-paper an’ it thinks it’s a palace. Listen, yer wouldn’t get far without me, would yer? No, none of yer are more than me, ‘cause yer all started from me.’

‘Oooh, he’s so common,’ squealed the windows daintily, ‘he’s so... well, you know, so low,’ they added in a whisper. ‘Now, we have listened to you all, and though it may make us shudder to be forced to speak for ourselves, we feel we must. We,’ they stated in the grandest of voices,’ are surely the most important, for we let in the light. We illuminate. One might even say we educate.’
‘Educate... educate!’ screeched the pictures and the books in unison. ‘Do you mind! That, my dear friends, is our job. It is us who fill their heads with knowing, we who will inspire their lives, their dreams. Indeed, surely we are the most important.’

And so it went on; the argument growing as more and more voices joined the debate: the carpets insisted they be valued for their softness on Sunday morning trips between the bed and the toaster; the fireplace claimed it fed their love with its warmth and other-worldly crackling - even the garden tried to petition its importance at drawing them out to the wonders of nature and all its healing powers, until, that is, the front door commented dryly that it knew a good woodland walk, and often led the young couple there. On and on the voices went, so much so it was a wonder they didn’t scare the couple away.

However, eventually they exhausted themselves. Slowly they talked them selves out and fell silent. Finally the house became still.

And then, the last voice spoke.

This voice began slowly, its volume building with the gentleness its size demanded; growing louder and larger, filling every part of the house, every crack, every nook. Indeed, no part was untouched by it.

And yet it made not a sound.

For it was the song of the void that lay between. The murmur of the nothing that stretched apart the roof, the walls and the floor. The not-being, that was necessary for the others to be.

‘Where have they been,’ the voice asked, ‘that I was not there to accompany them?’

‘Where can they go that I am not already there, waiting?’

‘And where can they be that I have not prepared with love?’

All this did it say, and yet made not a sound.

And in the booming quiet of this embrace, the house knew which of its gifts was valued most: not the protection of its shells, or the softness and warmth of its interiors, but the emptiness from which all life emerges, the silence where all can know itself, and the boundless space where all things become possible.

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