Buddhist Audio Books

I shall soon be leaving Moseley, the quiet, leafy Birmingham suburb where I have lived for the last fourteen years, and I wonder what memories of my present residence I shall carry with me to my new home in the countryside and how long those memories will persist. I shall certainly remember the garden, with its trees and shrubs, the flights of stone steps down to the lawn, the perimeter path round which I walked every morning, and the pond into which a small boy jumped thinking that the green algae with which it was covered was grass. The sounds of the place, too, I shall remember. I shall remember the hum of bees in the azaleas, the patter of rain on the roof of my study, and the dull drone of the low-flying passenger aircraft on its way to Birmingham airport. Above all, I think, I shall remember the tremulous cry of the owls that lived in the neighbouring trees and called to one another in the late evening. I would remember the cry of the owls, because my memories of the last two places in which I lived are inseparable from memories of the sound of birds. When I lived in Norfolk, on the outskirts of a village, I used to hear the sound of the wild geese flying overhead. They flew very low, so low that I could distinctly hear the regular beating of their wings. I also used to hear the cuckoo. As in the old rhyme, he came in April, sang all day in May, in June changed his tune, prepared to fly in July, had to go in August, and in September was only a memory – until the following Spring. When I lived in East London, as I did later on, I used to wake up every morning in summer to the sound of a blackbird’s full-throated song. He sang from the top of a neighbouring chimneypot, and he sang for an hour or more, after which he flew away, no doubt to go in search of his breakfast. I would have liked to celebrate the blackbird as magnificently as Shelley had celebrated the skylark, but this was a feat far beyond my limited poetic powers