Silence.

You don’t need to be told some things. You can sometimes tell more by a man’s silence and the set of his head than by what he says.

Wendell Berry, from Jayber Crow

Shafts.

For Nature’s particular gift to the walker, through the semi-mechanical act of walking—a gift no other form of exercise seems to transmit in the same high degree—is to set the mind jogging, to make it garrulous, exalted, a little mad maybe—certainly creative and super-sensitive, until at last it really seems to be outside of you and as it were talking to you, while you are talking back to it. Then everything gradually seems to join in, sun and the wind, the white road and the dusty hedges, the spirit of the season, whichever that may be, the friendly old Earth that is pushing forth life of every sort under your very feet or spellbound in deathlike winter trance, till you walk in the midst of a blessed company, immersed in a dream-talk far transcending any possible human conversation. Time enough, later, for that—across the dinner table, in smoking-room armchairs; here and now, the mind has shaken off its harness, is snorting and kicking up heels like a colt in a meadow. Not a fiftieth part of all your happy imaginings will you ever, later, recapture, note down, reduce to dull inadequate words; but meantime the mind has stretched itself and had its holiday. But this emancipation is only attained in solitude, the solitude which the unseen companions demand before they will come out and talk to you; for, be he who he may, if there is another fellow present, your mind has to trot between shafts.

A certain amount of "shafts," indeed, is helpful, as setting the mind more free; and so the high road, while it should always give way to the field path when choice offers, still has this particular virtue, that it takes charge of you—your body, that is to say. Its hedges hold you in friendly steering-reins, its milestones and fingerposts are always on hand, with information succinct and free from frills; and it always gets somewhere, sooner or later. So you are nursed along your way, and the mind may soar in cloudland and never need to be pulled earthwards by any string. But this is as much company as you ought to require, the comradeship of the road you walk on, the road which will look after you and attend to such facts as must not be overlooked. Of course the best sort of walk is the one on which it doesn’t matter twopence whether you get anywhere at all at any time or not; and the second best is the one on which the hard facts of routes, times, or trains, give you nothing to worry about. And this is perhaps the only excuse for the presence of that much-deprecated Other Fellow—that you can put all that sort of thing on to him.

Kenneth Graham, from "The Fellow That Goes Alone"

Empty.

Wyeth, Distant Thunder, 1961

The modern age knows nothing about isolation and nothing about silence. In our quietest and loneliest hour the automatic ice-maker in the refrigerator will cluck and drop an ice cube, the automatic dishwasher will sigh through its changes, a plane will drone over, the nearest freeway will vibrate the air. Red and white lights will pass in the sky, lights will shine along highways and glance off windows. There is always a radio that can be turned to some all-night station, or a television set to turn artificial moonlight into the flickering images of the late show. We can put on a turntable whatever consolation we most respond to, Mozart or Copland or the Grateful Dead.

Wallace Stegner, from The Angle of Repose

Answer? Harrison reminds us of the ancient and sacred rite of log-sitting ...

Pleasant.

The dirt resists you.  It is very hard to make the earth your own.  I’ve done much less to try to make it mine.  All my association with it is a kind of freedom.  Yet it’s hard to live at the ranch.  When I first came here I had to go 70 miles on a dirt road for supplies.  Nobody would go by in two weeks.  I thought the ranch would be good for me because nothing can grow here and I wouldn’t be able to use up my time gardening.  But I got tired of canned vegetables so now I grow everything I need for the year at Abiquiu.  I like to get up when the dawn comes.  The dogs start talking to me and I like to make a fire and maybe some tea and then sit in bed and watch the sun come up.  The morning is the best time, there are no people around.  My pleasant disposition likes the world with nobody in it.

Georgia O’Keeffe

Enjoy.

Listen.

Let us shut off the wireless and listen to the past.

Virginia Woolf

Beautiful.

Bourgeau, Super Moon, 2023

Have you ever heard the wonderful silence just before the dawn? Or the quiet and calm just as a storm ends? Or perhaps you know the silence when you haven't the answer to a question you've been asked, or the hush of a country road at night, or the expectant pause of a room full of people when someone is just about to speak, or, most beautiful of all, the moment after the door closes and you're alone in the whole house? Each one is different, you know, and all very beautiful if you listen carefully.

Norton Juster, from The Phantom Tollbooth

Fun.

The reason why even the normal human being should be half a hermit is that it is the only way in which his mind can have a half-holiday. It is the only way to get any fun even out of the facts of life; yes, even if the facts are games and dances and operas. It bears most resemblance to the unpacking of luggage. It has been said that we live on a railway station; many of us live in a luggage van; or wander about the world with luggage that we never unpack at all. For the best things that happen to us are those we get out of what has already happened. If men were honest with themselves, they would agree that actual social engagements, even with those they love, often seem strangely brief, breathless, thwarted or inconclusive. Mere society is a way of turning friends into acquaintances, the real profit is not in meeting our friends, but in having met them. Now when people merely plunge from crush to crush, and from crowd to crowd, they never discover the positive joy of life. They are like men always hungry, because their food never digests also, like those men, they are cross. There is surely something the matter with modern life when all the literature of the young is so cross.

That is something of the secret of the saints who went into the desert. It is in society that men quarrel with their friends; it is in solitude that they forgive them. And before the society-man criticizes the saint, let him remember that the man in the desert often had a soul that was like a honey-pot of human kindness, though no man came near to taste it; and the man in the modern salon, in his intellectual hospitality, generally serves out wormwood for wine.

G.K. Chesterton, from "The Case for Hermits"

Birdcall.

CELESTIAL MUSIC

I have a friend who still believes in heaven.

Not a stupid person, yet with all she knows, she literally talks to God.

She thinks someone listens in heaven.

On earth she's unusually competent.

Brave too, able to face unpleasantness.

We found a caterpillar dying in the dirt, greedy ants crawling over it.

I'm always moved by disaster, always eager to oppose vitality

But timid also, quick to shut my eyes.

Whereas my friend was able to watch, to let events play out

According to nature. For my sake she intervened

Brushing a few ants off the torn thing, and set it down

Across the road.

My friend says I shut my eyes to God, that nothing else explains

My aversion to reality. She says I'm like the child who

Buries her head in the pillow

So as not to see, the child who tells herself

That light causes sadness-

My friend is like the mother. Patient, urging me

To wake up an adult like herself, a courageous person-

In my dreams, my friend reproaches me. We're walking

On the same road, except it's winter now;

She's telling me that when you love the world you hear celestial music:

Look up, she says. When I look up, nothing.

Only clouds, snow, a white business in the trees

Like brides leaping to a great height-

Then I'm afraid for her; I see her

Caught in a net deliberately cast over the earth-

In reality, we sit by the side of the road, watching the sun set;

From time to time, the silence pierced by a birdcall.

It's this moment we're trying to explain, the fact

That we're at ease with death, with solitude.

My friend draws a circle in the dirt; inside, the caterpillar doesn't move.

She's always trying to make something whole, something beautiful, an image

Capable of life apart from her.

We're very quiet. It's peaceful sitting here, not speaking, The composition

Fixed, the road turning suddenly dark, the air

Going cool, here and there the rocks shining and glittering-

It's this stillness we both love.

The love of form is a love of endings.

John Donne

Reverence.

JIM HARRISON: NOTES on the SACRED ART of LOG SITTING

Approach the log cautiously with proper reverence as if you were entering a French cathedral.

If it’s over 60 degrees, inspect the lower sides of the log for rattlesnakes.

Now examine the log closely for the most comfortable place to sit, usually away from the sun.

Sit down.

Empty your mind of everything except what is in front of you—the natural landscape of the canyon.

Dismiss or allow to slide away any aspect of your grand or pathetic life.

Breathe softly. Avoid a doze.

Internalize what you see in the canyon: the oaks and mesquites, the rumpled and grassy earth, hawks flying by, a few songbirds.

Stay put for forty-five minutes to an hour. When you get up bow nine times to the log. 

Three logs a day is generally my goal.

Surrender.

To see the beauty of nature, you need total surrender. Shut your mouth, open your eyes and ears. That’s why I never learned to drive. The happiest hours of my life were spent walking the countryside with old friends before heading to a small pub or inn.

C.S. Lewis

Ease.

True intelligence operates silently.

Stillness is where creativity and

solutions to problems

are found.

Wisdom comes with the ability to be still.

Just look and just listen.

No more is needed.

Being still, looking, and listening

activates the non-conceptual

intelligence within you.

Let stillness direct your

words and actions.

When you look and listen in this way,

you may become aware of a subtle and at

first perhaps hardly noticeable sense of calm.

Some people feel it as a

stillness in the background.

Others call it peace.

When consciousness is no longer

totally absorbed by thinking,

some of it remains in its formless,

unconditioned, original state.

This is inner space.

Stillness is the only thing in

this world that has no form.

But then, it is not really a thing,

and it is not of this world.

Become at ease with the

state of not knowing.

Eckhart Tolle

Art.

NOTES on the SACRED ART of LOG SITTING

Approach the log cautiously with proper reverence as if you were entering a French cathedral or the bedroom of your lover.

If it’s over 60 degrees, inspect the lower sides of the log for Mohave rattlesnakes.

Now examine the log closely for the most comfortable place to sit, usually away from the sun.

Sit down.

Empty your mind of everything except what is in front of you—the natural landscape of the canyon.

Dismiss or allow to slide away any aspect of your grand or pathetic life.

Breathe softly. Avoid a doze.

Internalize what you see in the canyon: the oaks and mesquites, the rumpled and grassy earth, hawks flying by, a few songbirds.

Stay put for forty-five minutes to an hour. When you get up bow nine times to the log. Three logs a day is generally my maximum.

Jim Harrison

Heard.

We are all wound up in lies and illusions and as soon as we begin to think and talk, the machinery of falsity operates automatically.  No writing on the solitary, meditative dimensions of life can say anything that has not already been said better by the wind in the pine trees. These pages seek nothing more than to echo the silence and peace that is “heard” when the rain wanders freely among the hills and forests. But what can the wind say when there is no hearer? There is then a deeper silence: the silence in which the Hearer is No-Hearer. That deeper silence must be heard before one can speak truly of solitude.

Thomas Merton, from Thoughts in Solitude

Deepening.

Solitude is not something you must hope for in the future. Rather, it is a deepening of the present, and unless you look for it in the present you will never find it. 

Thomas Merton

Happy Birthday, Borges

Don't talk unless you can improve the silence.

Jorge Luis Borges, born on this day in 1899

Quiet.

I am lost to the world

With which I used to waste so much time,

It has heard nothing from me for so long

That it may very well believe that I am dead!

It is of no consequence to me

Whether it thinks me dead;

I cannot deny it,

For I really am dead to the world.

I am dead to the world's tumult,

And I rest in a quiet realm!

I live alone in my heaven,

In my love and in my song.

Friedrich Rückert

Silence.

Every year, I verify here, alongside the intelligence of the mineral world and the animal kingdom, the proportional stupidity of the human race - the deculturated peasants and acculturated tourists, arrogant adults and children with their pretentious technical gadgetry and senseless chatter. All the other species are more docile and spiritual in their silence than this one.

Jean Baudrillard, from Fragments

Solitude.

Friedrich, The Dreamer, 1835

I must stay alone and know that I am alone to contemplate and feel nature in full; I have to surrender myself to what encircles me, I have to merge with my clouds and rocks in order to be what I am. Solitude is indispensable for my dialogue with nature.

Caspar David Friedrich

Purchased.

All my passionate proclamations of the isolate selfhood’s aesthetic value are necessarily qualified by the reminder that the leisure for meditation must be purchased from the community.

Harold Bloom