I loved the quiet days, the ones of still telephones and silent clocks. I loved the random sounds that came sailing in the breeze; the birdsong came so sweetly, almost tangible, as if it were softly spun sugar. I would sit there upon the clouds that were my dreams until, as the ones above are so prone to do, they condensed to form the random ideas that quench my mind. It was on those quiet days that ideas came as natural things do - from the sunshine, rain and earth.
The quiet days were idled away, sitting in my armchair near the most sunny window. The song was the gentle hum of the laundry machine and the rhythmic passing of cars on the street. The high notes were the sirens, the horns and the hollering. I guess to someone unaccustomed it could be less than therapeutic, but I was a city girl, and these were the sounds of home.
On those quiet days when everyone left soon after eating, it was a chance to enjoy pottering about. With the music on and nothing but the trees for company, I slowly put my small world in order. I can honestly say that those days were my salve, a chance for the spinning top of ideas, that carousel of duties to slow and occasionally stop. It was as if I had truly been given the day, and I could bow to the way the world is, this insane notion that to relax one has to do nothing or be pampered... or do what I really love. I loved to make everything look clean, to bake, to garden and write whatever ideas were drifting by that day. I thought of those days as if God had granted me a button to stop the world for a day, so that I could breathe and have the serenity of wakeful rest.
My quiet days were feathers without hurry, moving this way and that in the air, happy to change direction according to the wind. Just as the feather will in its own sweet time be at rest upon the earth, so the sun will rise and set high in the sky. Yet in each gifted moment between them, there is such freedom, an infinitely branching path with no paths at all. And in that complete liberty there is a need for the calm kind of patience, the one that is content to await the path to glow, to show itself worthy of adventure, of curiosity, of enchantment.