Recently, one morning found me cross-legged on the sofa, wearing an eye-mask and giggling to myself. I had not gone mad, believe it or not, but was failing at being calm and peaceful – albeit in an amused way.
Lately, I have been trying to make time for a short meditation each day and as such I have been following a few different guided reflections, found online, and it is fair to say that some have been better than others.
There are many of these audio guides and I dare say I could try a new one each day of the year and generally they follow a very similar format, as do the accompanying sounds that form their background: rainforests, trickling streams, flutes, vaguely eastern plinking sounds – you know the kind of thing. Over the top of these soundscapes a voice will softly and gently instruct you to breathe, focus on certain ideas or thoughts and generally encourage you to relax, let go and take a moment away from the incessant internal chatter that plagues so many of us and, on the whole, they do their job well.
But on this morning I just couldn’t get through to the end of the link I had clicked on because, instead of allowing myself to be lulled into a state of relaxation and to focus on the good words being said, I couldn’t help but laugh at the narrator’s voice.
Now, that might sound a bit cruel and I really don’t mean it to be, but the voice that came to me via my phone speakers put me in mind of Droopy. For those of you who do not know who this is, Droopy was a cartoon hound first appearing in the 1940’s and although he was sharp-minded and in a ‘tortoise and the hare’ way would always outwit his opponents (a Zoot-suited wolf springs to mind) his voice was slow, monotonous and with some kind of narrow-throated drawl. (At this point I have to confess I may have watched a few old cartoons purely in an aim to exorcise the memory you understand.) As much as I enjoyed these animations, it just wasn’t a voice that worked for me to aid gentle meditation.
I have to say though, that I have a new-found respect for narrators and those whose jobs entail reading aloud and this is because I have recently been doing some myself in the form of short story podcasts and was surprised to find how hard it was to begin with. I can read. I can speak. So why was it suddenly so hard to do so when being recorded?
Voices can make such an impact and as keenly as scents, can elicit long-lost memories. I don’t think I’d be alone in saying that a voice I have known all my life and love to hear is that of Sir David Attenborough. It is a voice of trust and warmth and familiarity – I’m pretty sure if it were he reading the lengthy terms and conditions that are always powered through by a speed-talking operative at the end of any insurance, amenities or other incredibly boring call then I might find myself actually listening.
Sitting down to eat our Sunday roast on a weekend, MOTH and I were listening to a CD of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. (This sounds all rather sophisticated – until I tell you that at the time it started playing, I was holding a crispy chicken wing in my fingers and gnawing straight off the bone – the best bit in my opinion!) But the Spring melody, as it always does when I hear it, took me straight back to childhood and a story tape we had where Puss in Boots was narrated over this piece of music. I could hear the voice so clearly and instantly many of the other stories instantly popped into my head – including a very strange tale about a frog in Australia who drank all the water in the land and the other animals had to take it in turns to try and make him laugh, which eventually he did allowing all the water to flow back out.
I may not have found the meditation narrated by a Droopy sound-alike useful for the purpose for which it was intended but it did happily send me down several enjoyable branches of memory lane. I am sure, like me, there are voices you will always remember; for the good, the bad but also – the downright silly.
I have since looked up the story of the greedy water drinking frog – it was an Aboriginal tale and the frog was called Tiddalik.
You can hear me narrating my strange tale short stories by clicking here or on the links on my short story page.
*MOTH Man Of The House