But the quiet grows and grows. Beautifully and unbearably.
I have always been caught by the pull of the unremarkable, by the easily missed, infinitely nourishing beauty of the mundane.
Why shouldn't we, so generally addicted to the gigantic, at last have some small works of art, some short poems, short pieces of music [...], some intimate, low-voiced, and delicate things in our mostly huge and roaring, glaring world?
I think I like 'em better like that...divinely dull...just the quiet bearers of their own beauty, like the priestesses in a Panathenaic procession.
I love medieval cities; they do not clamor for attention; they possess their souls - their riches - in quiet; formal, courteous, they reveal themselves slowly, stone by stone, garden by garden; hidden treasures wait calmly to be loved and yield to introspective wandering.
Like a graceful vase, a cat, even when motionless, seems to flow.
I force my eyes upward and look at Mia for the first time. She's still beautiful. Not in an obvious Vanessa LeGrande or Bryn Shraeder kind of way. In a quiet way that's always been devastating to me. Her hair, long and dark, is down now, swimming damply against her bare shoulders, which are still milky white and covered with the constellation of freckles that I used to kiss. The scar on her left shoulder, the one that used to be an angry red weld is silvery pink now. Almost like the latest rage in tattoo accessories. Almost pretty.
The silence of snow, thought the man sitting just behind the bus driver.
There is a gentleness in Michigan that you just can't replicate.
I went snorkeling between tectonic plates in Iceland's Silfra fissure in the winter. You have to wear thermal layers and a wet suit and what's called a 'teddy-bear suit' so you don't die of hypothermia. My lips still went blue. That was an experience that I will carry with me for the rest of my life - so beautiful and so quiet.
Nature's silence is its one remark, and every flake of world is a chip off that old mute and immutable block.
Flowers are sent to do God's work in unrevealed paths, and to diffuse influence by channels that we hardly suspect.
