Quiet

Until this week, I'd never visited Farm Sanctuary in the off-season. I'd been up a few times for Thanksgiving, but Thanksgiving is sort of a one day "on-season" in the midst of the off-season, isn't really what I mean. In my what have now become many visits, I'd walked onto the farm only in the summer, or on that holiday, with small crowds of people, sunshine, a certain low-key and very relaxing bustle. Nights spent in the cabin have always involved my wife (and in the past two years, our son), wide open sky, a bottle of wine, stars, long talks.

When I got there this week, it was, from the moment I got out of my car, different.

It's the off-season.

The gift shop was closed, that low-key bustle was no bustle at all, no faces, no voices. It was early afternoon, but the sky was already dark, the rain came off and on, not too much at once, but just this thin drizzle now and then. The wind, which had been severe down in the town, on the thruway getting there, was that much more fierce up there in the hills, cut into me, shook everything. I found someone who found the key to my cabin, checked in alone, and unpacked my things, listening to wind shake the door and whistle through cracks, listening to the howling, the occasional patter of rain on the roof, hoping that the little heater in the wall would be able to keep the cabin comfortably warm overnight.

I was happy. This wasn't what I'd pictured, but it was exactly what I'd come for. I took the small pile of notebooks and the one thick book I'd brought (Karen Armstrong's The Case For God) and set them on the nighstand, thinking-- happily, perhaps melodramatically-- back on some passages from my very favorite Thomas Merton book:

The rain I am in is not like the rain of cities. It fills the woods with an immense and confused sound. It covers the flat roof of the cabin and its porch with insistent and controlled rhythms. And I listen, because it reminds me again and again that the whole world runs by rhythms I have not yet learned to recognize, rhythms that are not those of the engineer.

I cam here from the monastery last night... The night became very dark. The rain surrounded the whole cabin with its enormous virginal myth, a whole world of meaning, of secrecy, of silence, of rumor. Think of it: all that speech pouring down, selling nothing, judging nobody, drenching the thick mulch of dead leaves, soaking the trees, filling the gullies and crannies of the wood with water, washing out the places where men have stripped the hillside! What a think it is to sit absolutely alone, in the forest, at night, cherished by this wonderful, unintelligible, perfectly innocent speech, the most comforting speech in the world, the talk that rain makes by itself...

After a short nap-- listening to the wind shaking the place, I was just sort of lulled to sleep, I couldn't help it-- and an hour or so of reading, I drove into town for a bit. Had dinner in a decent Chinese restaurant with a good vegetarian menu. I had thought I might catch a movie, but the theatre was closed for the night. Thought I might spend a little time in a bookstore/cafe that I'd driven by a dozen times before, but discovered that that place was closed for good.

So it was back to the cabin, back to the quiet, back to the thoughts I'd been putting off and hiding from for so many weeks and month, back to the reasons I'd decided to drive out there alone, to the piles of empty pages that I hoped to fill, the book I hoped to take something from, the cushions and mats that I hoped would keep me sitting still long enough to hear my own breathing, to discover a little stillness within.

I spent a lot of hours in the quiet.

In the morning, I got up early, had my breakfast, spent some time scratching cows and goats behind the ears, laughed when a dominant goat chased the others off so that he alone could enjoy the apparent ecstasy of a good scratching, then headed down into town where I walked up and down the gorge trail (feeling out of shape on those last few steep stairs, the longest three miles I've done in a long time).

And then I came back home. Where it is happy, where it is good, but where it is not quiet. Not quiet at all. Where I will have to work hard to put into practice the insights that I had while briefly able to listen to the wind and to the rain and to the sound of my own breathing.