Midwinter Silence

I’d like to claim the sky is often quiet, but that would be a lie.  It is, however, always beautiful

• Fast paced times and consumer obsession result in loud suburbs.  Spring begins the building season, until late fall _ cement mixers, lumber deliveries, hammers, bulldozers, dawn to dusk.  Earlier spring echoes with chain saws and leaf blowers, which scream into early winter.  Always overhead jets, always around sirens, summer filled with motorcycles, helicopters, trucks, cars, dogs, music, outdoor parties. 
• Winter has become the only period of grace, when gentle sounds of nature are not eliminated by mechanical cacophony.  I walk beaches and shores, listening to the crunch of leaves, occasional birdcall, slap of wave on rock, wind in branches, geese flying, profound hush.  Once upon a time, I assume, quiet was a normal state.  In any case, it is unusual enough now that I find myself almost shocked when I pause a moment and hear _ nothing at all.

It is so easy to ignore the common everyday miracles of our existence _ sight and color and sleeping tree limbs.

• Like the old but true cliché of steam train whistles echoing for miles across the plains, noise in the suburbs carries more widely than in cities.  Houses torn down across the harbor, trees cut on far hills, garbage trucks many neighborhoods over are easily and always heard.  No barriers baffle any sound, and dense population with money to burn means that something is always being done somewhere.
• Once in a while, in midwinter, a deep snowfall will hush even this neighborhood.  At least until the snowplows and snowthrowers come out, around nine or so.  I am guilty myself.  It’s a facet of this way of life never remarked upon in sales brochures. 
• In fact, lately, almost everyone stays inside most of the time, shutting away the world with insulation and thick glass.  The few times anyone ventures outside, for a barbecue or to direct garden work crews, they come equipped with loud music.  Which, of course, just adds to the general decibel level.

Sure, another take, why not?  Frigid but lovely as another sunset fades.

• Beauty may be an elitist affectation.  Appreciation of the world is difficult when you are starving, threatened, or in great pain.  Perhaps most of our ancestors could not enjoy silence, perhaps, like us, they just accepted their environment, focused on what was important, and ignored the rest.
• Everyone today hides from noise.  In hermetically sealed houses, in massively soundproofed cars, in specially designed buffered space at work and restaurants and shops. Or they shield themselves with noise cancellation earphones, or blasting headwear music. 
• They miss, thereby, the cries of gulls overhead, the crash of waves, and the more subtle notes of birds in bush, breaking twigs, wind in pines, and footsteps on frozen turf.  My solitary pleasure in midwinter silence.  

Tiny Adventures

Sprinkle of snow, windy cold have cleared this park as effectively as jungle fevers.

• Fads come and go as people try to cope with stressful madness of modern life.  “Slow food,” mindfulness, meditation and many commercially trademarked solutions promise at least some relief.  I have found myself enjoying what I call “tiny adventures.”
• An adventure has been famously defined as “something that when you are having it you wish you were somewhere else, but when you are not having it you wish you were having.”  My adventures are not quite like that.  They are merely actions that take me a little bit out of my comfort zone _ walking in the woods on a frigid day, going to an event instead of sitting on the couch.  True explorers are laughing their heads off at my hubris.
• I don’t care.  Adventures are largely an attitude.  Some travelers on cruises and world tours never leave the comfort of their settled consciousnesses, just as some diners hardly notice what they are eating.

Horror writers and film directors can transform birds into adrenaline-provoking menaces.

• A recent winter walk provides an example.  The temperature was just below 28 degrees _ nothing too formidable _ but near-gale winds blasted out of the Northwest.  I bundled up in long underwear, heavy socks, insulated boots, wool cap, and down mittens.  Then I took a two mile walk along a local causeway facing Long Island Sound.
• Half of that was directly into the gusts, which were whipping up whitecaps on waves which unusually were almost as high as on the ocean.  Spray fumed up from rocks, smart birds were huddled in sheltered coves.  Once in a while I was nearly knocked over.  Time seemed suspended in furious motion.
• Rewards were beauty, solitude, and a sense of natural peace.  I felt a connection to the “real world” that never happens in my house or car, or in some brightly lit store.  And when I finally returned to the parking lot to drive home, I had the relaxed feeling of having accomplished something memorable.  Not quite a trip to the North Pole with a sled dog, but within my limits an extraordinary moment.

What might be? Tree spirits?  Rock kobolds?  Pond sprites?  Snow elves? Imagination has no limits.

• OK, you are right, common thrills like this are simply being more conscious of our environment.  Like eating with comprehension, or becoming mindful of everything we take for granted.  It is just that I find it a little easier to jar into this appreciation pattern when I am doing something a little bit out of the ordinary, or something which I could easily have avoided to take it easy.
• I find the world full of the possibility of such tiny adventures.  A ride on a New York Subway rivals anything at Disney.  Driving the LIE can flash moments of sheer terror.  Watching seagulls on a deserted beach for half an hour is very like a visit to a zoo.  To an outside observer, my world may seem constricted and claustrophobic, but from my perspective it is wide enough for all time.
• Laugh at this old guy as you will.  I find days full of marvels, where others see only grey boredom.  As long as my imagination can fuel enhanced senses, I will appreciate these chances to be somewhat more than I usually am.

Gift Horse

Frozen wetlands, decaying early docks surrounded by increasing “affluence.”

•  “Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth” may need explanation to younger readers.  At a time when horses were valuable possessions, the idea was that if you received one as a gift, it was improper to search for what was wrong with it.  No matter what, it was, after all, a horse.
• Sometimes it seems that everyone is examining our own gift horse _ life in a wonderful era _ in its mouth and elsewhere with microscopes.  Compared to past generations here and now is paradise for an awful lot of folks, and much less hell for others.  Famine is almost banished, diseases have hope of control, frostbite is rare, and entertainment and comforts are at a level unknown even to previous emperors.  “But, but, but,” naysayers cluck.
• Part of this is simple lack of time and focus, too much information to digest, and vertiginous sense that all is adrift.  Who has time to read real history?  Rushing from moment to moment seeking ever greater thrills is hardly conducive to contemplation.

Colorful billboard proclaims summer joys in the midst of frigid wind-chill

• I recently finished an eye-opening 1934 book A History of Agriculture in the State of New York State by Ulysses Prentiss Hedrick.  Farming upstate in the 1800’s, even with Iroquois subdued and gone, was wretched by modern standards. 
• Chopping massive trees to clear stony land, never-ending work inside and out dawn to dusk, preserving your own food, making your own crude tools, struggling with no money, alone almost always.  Worn out, tired, and nothing to do at night in the dark except _ well many women having 10 or more babies (offspring useful to help with the chores, if they survived), most dying eventually in childbirth.  For some women, death became freedom from a hard life.  You need to read the details to appreciate the agonies _ and I know none of you have time.
• And yet _ in spite of insects, disease, relentless toil, accidents, and the hardest winters in modern times _ life was so bad where these settlers had come from that many of them considered that frontier as paradise.  At least there was always something to eat, and never any armies rampaging through to rape, mutilate, and loot everything which could be carried off.  

Free pleasure-palace for locals, taken for granted by all, an amazing artifact of our complacent civilization.

• Disdaining common sense, capitalists claim human needs are insatiable.  We always want more. We may be rich, may own exquisite and massive objects or property, may live lives that our ancestors could only dream about, but economic declared truth is that we wish to be richer, own more, live better.  We can never be happy as long as there is the possibility that we might exceed our visions.
• Yet we are clearly sated at times _ we cannot drink infinite amounts of water or beer, we get sick with too much food, we are unable to sleep all day.  In the midst of plenty, I can become bored and restless.  Happiness and contentment seem to be inner attributes, only modestly enhanced by externalities after a modest plateau of satisfaction is achieved.
• I believe the possibility of happy equilibrium is simply achieving a stable situation where I feel relatively secure, exercise general control over my predictable local days, and have hope of changing or eliminating whatever bothers me directly.  That is quite a lot, and certainly sufficient for a good life.  Anything more is whipped cream and illusion, in spite of what advertisers shout at me.
• Sometimes, being only human, I do forget my fine fortune: being alive in this day and age, having had a valuable and mostly happy life.  Then I need to remember, read, and contemplate the relatively horrible times endured by my ancestors and all other humans in the not-so-distant past.       

World As Play

Whelk shells free for taking and examination, a young child’s treasures.

• Growing elder by the day, I am enjoying the world as a child of 11 or 2.  It is a tremendous playground which constantly excites me, and with which I can interact as I please.
• I often anthropomorphized the unknowable universe as a personal God.  What rules should I follow, how should I judge my actions?  Rules are necessary, whether I accept them by blind supernatural faith, cynical social requirement, or some logical combination of attitude and experience.  Most of the time, rules were useful ways to set boundaries and let me concentrate on my duties of each moment.
• But now I am free of most of that.  I have done my part.  Each day dawns and I run to the swings or the sandbox or just dance through the meadow.  I am happy, and if I am wrong I accept whatever consequences may arrive.

Beauty shines in expected and unexpected places, if only I train myself to relax and observe.

• Religions _ regardless of outward appearances _ address the biggest questions of being.  How much control do I have over my life?  Which set of morality should I follow, or at least pretend to follow?  What is the best direction for my time and energy?
• Answers have ranged from rigid predestination to absolute control of my fate.  The easiest morality is that which everyone around me accepts, but sometimes it seems better to resist.  Often I have felt very little choice in the direction of what I had to do to survive and thrive.

Once upon a time, I felt more in control than a wild duck _ now I’m not so sure.

• Most “normal” adults, in a “normal” life of seventy or so years, follow a normal curve of skill and competence.  We begin with none, and end with none, and in the middle of our lives we feel masters of our universe. 
• Unfortunately, power often trails skill.  Our early mastery is often recognized in hindsight.  Old people with decaying skills retain vast residues of power which they use badly.  Some reign as arbitrarily vicious patriarchs or matriarchs of extended families, some wreck fine companies they once created, and some damage civilization by playing politics as they angrily slide into  senility.

Shiny New Inertia

Rising water, fouled air, vanishing wildlife _ yet it all looks the same.

• New Year!  Time to change our tired old ways!  We take stability for granted, and swear resolutions of hopeful progress.  Better diet, more exercise, less wasted time, whatever. 
• Meanwhile, we take daily continua of marvels for granted.  We see stability where universal chaos hangs in the balance moment by moment.  Before we rush off to do things differently, we should pause a moment to celebrate inertia.
• Our body is a seething cauldron of tensions, all but unnoticed until something goes wrong.  Trillions of cells are, each second and nanosecond, engaged in complex engineering feats of building and destroying molecules, harvesting or storing energy, frantically replicated.  Almost those cells will have been replaced by the next time we celebrate this arbitrary celestial checkoff.  Our body less a delicately balanced machine than an infinitely complex contraction in which one tendency (barely) balances off another, always threatening to veer out of control.
• Our mind _ we cannot describe our entire mind.  Fleeting memories, focus that floats and overlays, that forgets and modifies.  Senses that lie even as they describe how to survive or which bring terror and beauty.  Consciousness is a mystery completely to itself, isolated from logic, infinitely mysterious and wonderful.  Always present, almost always unnoticed.

Salt marshes may soon drown but remain for now as beautiful as ever.

• After all time, most of the universe has settled into a predictable pattern which continues along heedless of all the time that remains.  Each day the sun rises, the moon pulls the tides, the solstice stars journey through the heavens, the planets wander.  Even that ponderous inertia is illusion.
• Earth calmly orbits the sun _ no, not really _ this planet tries to go in a straight line but is forcefully dragged into a curves generated by mysterious gravity.  Photons and neutrinos flick everywhere, leptons seethe in and out of existence unseen.  Atoms are assemblages of churning forces constantly contending with one another _ all solid matter is mostly raging space.
• The stars and sun spew out massive amounts of energy, although radioactive elements spark a bit.  It all seems so normal.  Because we have evolved to accept what is, almost everything at human scale appears to us as stable, right, and natural.
• That is the inertia we take for granted.  The wonderful platform of all we are.

Even threatening skies are beautiful, a blessing and curse on our perceptions of change.

• Stability is useful.  Mostly, we want everything to be as it is, just a little better.  Resolutions are usually pretty minor things, in the grand scheme of our existence.  The inertia of daily life carries us along and allows us to make adjustments.
• So as an arbitrary new year dawns, flush with grand plans and high expectations and vows of wonders yet to be, we should also pause a moment in gratitude for all that continues.  We are learning that it may be necessary to spend much time and effort protecting all that was, all that is.  The shiny inertia which we inhabit, physical, social, moral, and personal.