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This morning, it’s profoundly quiet.

Off, some miles from here, I can hear the distant rumbling of a freighter, its deep engines humming; and even now, that is fading. Otherwise, there is the soft murmur of the lightest rippling, a sussurant touch of water touching the shoreline. And beyond that, there is silence.

I feel a kind of joy, there, in the profundity — the quiet, the alone, the quietude in merely listening, slowing far down and contemplating the absence of recognizable sound. And I think about that idea of aloneness. And all oneness — in being solitary, can one find another sense of collective connection — in every thing?

Meanwhile, in that quiet, there is a sudden rustling — something moving toward me in the moonlit gauze of light, dispersed here. And it’s a sea otter, that’s softly moving over the decks, furtively skirting the edges, exploring — yet ready to bolt in an instant. And stepping outside, further, to study it, I awaken a massive grey heron, nesting in the sumi-inkblack strokes of the tree that draws a line in the horizon — an long and gnarled vertical stroke, connecting heaven and earth, over the stretch of salted sea that lies — out there. Heron, that now wheels off in the grey black of the morning; and its croaking, prehistoric garble echoes out there, across the southern darkened sound, that body of surging tidal water that moves, in the swing of the moon, in and out, during the very passage of time. It never stops. And while I do, just for a moment, I can still sense my heart beat.

Slow, like the tide, mine too, in some softer pulse of the planet, a rhythm that goes and goes, onwards. And who knows how the lunar grasp might change my beat, in tune with things that lie within, and yet far beyond this pale of experience.

My mother has written me a note about the concept of exuberance. In her reading, she’s found this — and I love it:

here’s the talk that catalyzed a new book by Kay Jamison called Exuberance….

“It is a curious request to make of God. SHIELD YOUR JOYOUS ONES, asks the Anglican prayer. We have given sorrow many words, but a passion for life few, by its pleasures, exuberance lures us from our common places and quieter moods; and it gives ascendant reason to venture forth all over again.”

Blake said,

“Under every grief and pine
Runs a joy of silken twine.”

….

keep the spirit of love in your heart, and your soul on wing….
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TSG | out (t)here
http://www.girvin.com/new/human_brands.php