How rare in our world to sit absolutely still for an hour, not thinking, not even feeling, simply being in the presence of great beauty! At first one notices the small things, the subtle changes as wind suddenly ruffles a small space in the water, the amber color of still water over sand, or the reflection of a single tree; but little by little, it is the whole unified scene that takes over. And it is the silence itself that unifies it. One slides down deep deep into contemplation. This is not ecstasy like the light on lavender petals. It is more like prayer. Beauty beyond our understanding and beyond our uniqueness as individuals. Presence that asks nothing of us except to be in its presence. And filled with that presence, we walk back into our separate lives.
Once, in the early days of my desolution, I thought I might learn to write in the language of the spiders. Now, led by the Child, I am on my way to it. The true language, I know now, is that speech in silence in which we first communicated, the Child and I, in the forest, when I was asleep. It is the language I used in my childhood, and some memory, intangibly there by not quite audible, of our marvelous conversations, comes to me again at the very edge of sleep, a language my tongue almost rediscovers and which would, I believe, reveal the secrets of the universe to me the language whose every syllable is a gesture of reconciliation. I spoke it in my childhood. I must discover it again.