Ever get the feeling that if you could just…stop long enough…just listen long enough, just sink into the silence, the ancient, rippling, living, roaring SILENCE …if I could just sit at the edge of this green lake and hear nothing but the sound of air sifting its way through thousands of fir branches, that if I could just stay in that utter stillness that is so much more than silence ONE MOMENT LONGER…You would get it? You could reach that thing that hovers, the faint trace lost by the flap of an eyelid, you could remember that dream that dissolves upon waking?

If I could sit I huddled in my chair in the wind, my world filled only with water, tree and rock…and wind…if I could stay, and not get bored, and not start wondering if I’ve been here too long, and not start thinking about the job I’ll have to take when I get back, or the German girls in the next campsite, or how I wish I was standing here, not alone, but with another who shared this stillness without breaking it, without releasing my hand…who knew not to speak or expect speech…who knew, instinctively, that this was something sacred and not to be broken…

That something, that thing that is lost when all these intruders rush back in to fill the void…when you must pack the car, and think again of schedules, and obligations, and needs…if you could just get THAT…