Years before, I performed well in the appreciation of a simple quiet. In truth, isolation. A week would pass without words. Winter with it's silencing effect used the snow of the Sierra Nevada mountains to insulate footsteps and voices, a gentleness nearly unknown to me now. I spent many months in those woods. Locked in them as it may have been with a fine and somehow redeemable solitude."The wine of youth" one writer said. This solitude, such wilderness as virtue.
I embraced this for years, Strongly.
After the mountains it became the length of days at sea. The Us Navy gave me a rack on a ship and its library treasured old novels from Melville and Richard Henry Dana which kept me awake during long hours on watch. Men of great solitude. Men of rigor and brute spirituality. Labor here was virtue, quick and decisive. Somehow though, when you are prayerfully set against the quiet hum of engines below decks it was never enough, like hymns waiting finally for a greater expression.
The house is quiet except for the dog at rest with her loud respiratory problem. Past midnight. The wine finished and chores left for tomorrow. Tonight my wife is in a Monterrey hotel on business, and by now the vessels off the California coast have set darken ship at sea and small animals scurry to gather for winter in much higher elevations. I sit happy to be without the past and all of it's vacancies thinking now exclusively of my wife who I miss desperately even before one solitary night has us apart.
