For thus said the Lord God, the Holy One of Israel: In returning and rest you shall be saved; in quietness and in trust shall be your strength. But you refused. Isaiah 30:15

All snowflakes start from a particle of dust. As they fall through the wet womb of the cloud, they grow feathers or spikes or wings: each according to its journey. Temperature and humidity shape the snowflake into a bit of falling art. It cannot maintain its shape once it settles to the ground, so, within seconds, the elegant lattice-work collapses, never to be seen by any but the sky and the passing crow.

We are all particles. Swarms of them. Buzzing, pulsing, clouds of particles that journey through life. Being is a wild interplay of charges and probabilities and more than a touch of chaos. We spin through the tumbling expanse of space, which is, apparently, poorly named being crammed with more matter than we have names for. Light and dark matter. Up and down spins. Positive and negative charges. Waves of being radiating, accelerating toward greater being. “Even if we observe a small, empty region of space in which there are no atoms, we still detect a minute swarming of . . . particles. There is no such thing as a real void, one that is completely empty.” (Rovelli, p 33)

On my dining room table, set for ten, with oak veneer only puckering in three small places, I have three round platters. Each month or so I go out into my neighborhood to find bits of this or that to fill the platters with. In December I cut holy and ivy. In January I settled for a candle scape (nature is a bit withholding in January and I hate the cold). In February I splurged for a miniature rose bush from the grocery store. And a red cyclamen. And a pot of red tulips. And a tiny red kalanchoe. And a pillar candle with a red ribbon tied around the middle. After all, we could all use a bit of spoiling in February. But last week, as March roared in, I moved the spent bulbs and rose to the garage for hardening off for spring planting. I needed less.I harvested moss from the back yard and planted a pot of crimson clover. The three plates lie there, gently meeting the eye. Undemanding. Three plates of moss on my dining room table is what my soul needed.

It is a lot to be an effervescent cloud of particles dancing through a crowded universe.

Life can be a bit much. A bit chattery. A bit noisy. We work so hard to embrace it all that, at times, we find ourselves staring out the window waiting for the bits of ourselves, flung wide across the universe, to re-coalesce. A momentary pause within the cacophony. A bit of quiet. A dish of moss.

It is ok to be quiet a moment. If a snowflake can fall in gratuitous elegance from cloud to ground and collapse without a thought, you can let this moment go by uncaptured. Undirected. Unaided.

Quiet.

Writing Practice Instructions

Writing Practice Prompts:

When it gets quiet…
It spread out around me like…
Pebbles remind me of…
Everything I know about snow…
If I had waited…
What held us together was…
I wish it had fit better, but…

Quietness