(dec 2) - The woods are like a department store the day after the final close-out sale. Everything is quiet and unmoving, except for stray leaves and the occasional procrastinating squirrel. The silence of the woods in early winter is strange, moving: one feels a mood of a year well spent, a pause before the real cold comes, and that elusive silence. I have tried to describe it for years, with not much luck. It has something to do with our narrow sense of what it means to be alive: life is an on-off switch for most of us, and that is linked to things that move and things that don't. The trees are alive, but slowed and unmoving; hushed, and that puzzles. But what if there were flavours of life and non-life? -- to speak of the opposite: at the moment when the fish struggles over the rapids and cataracts, does it not have more in common with the roaring waters than with anything else that simply has a beating heart?
I grope for an example of something alive, and powerful, and yet hushed and unmoving, and it comes to me. A roomful of meditating monks. And I suddenly see the woods as a forest of meditators, tree beings in deep thought, clothed in their bark, poised, full of silence. Which explains something: why I too calm down, and feel something of the strength and quiet that pervades these grey December woods.