I’m in central Texas right now, visiting family for the Solstice season, one of my favorite times of the year. It’s the precise mathematical, emotional, and spiritual center point between light and dark, the peak of the sine wave that tracks the cycle of seasons, beginning the slow, gradual descent down the curve toward the roller-coaster arrival of springtime.

I’m half-sitting, half-lying in a “hammock-chair”, my first introduction to this strange sideways swing that turns out to be surprisingly comfortable ~ once my nephew showed me how to stretch out my legs in it. Then it’s comfy as a cloud.

The dawn air is suffused with a fragrance that must be from the trees in his yard. He tells me they’re Live Oaks, a species separate from all other Oaks (a fact which any self-respecting woodworker would know, but which, it would appear, I did not).

Unlike other Oaks, it keeps its prickly, gnarled leaves year round, so these are still green. The tree canopy reaches up to a pale blue sky which fairs down to soft pink at the horizon. The morning is calm and quiet. I feel the silence.

Silence is not the same as quiet.

A lack of sound from the outside often still leaves a chaotic cacophony within, a clamoring clutter of background chatter. A black noise that drowns out all of the original signal. Though sometimes necessary (Look out, David, panther at two o’clock! ), it can easily become the ground of experience, a constant backdrop, a felt baseline which in time comes to seem normal. A seething foam of noise we grow so inured to that its absence can be unnerving ~ even frightening.

But on this delightful dawn, with the light and warmth of the sun beckoning the coming day, it’s easy to let myself fall into the silence, let it wash over me like a benevolent tide, a delicious absence of any sound whatsoever.

Moments pass. The silence seems endless.

I drift off into a reverie inside the quietness. It’s must be okay to sit here doing nothing, absolutely nothing, because it truly does feel like everything: just watching what’s been going on with myself and the world while I haven’t been watching.

Once we breathe and relax, all the senses can open wide. The stream of input then has a chance to announce itself: the smell of coffee, the curl of steam lifting from the cup, the curl of the fingers wrapped round the handle, the tongue anticipating the arrival of that remembered taste that so wakes the spirit.

And deeper still, a world within gradually comes into our awareness, gently rising in the body like a bubble through honey, a vast subterranean choir made of every sense and something beyond senses. A well beneath the waking mind. Something which has apparently been here ever and always, waiting for even the feeblest, most frightened exploratory hand to reach out for quietude, the basic substance and sustenance of all living things.

This is a state always available. No special room, mood or setting is required. We can draw it over ourselves like a warm cloak simply by breathing in, letting ourselves fall into the world right where we are, into the body in which we already live.

Breathe in. Sit inside this multitude of cells silently beating their community rhythm. Feel what it is like to be here. In this moment, then the next, the next, the next, each one a universe.

Breathing out, we release a bit of ourselves back into the world. No need to talk or even think, just to feel the presence that we create. To be at peace with who we find inside.

Now I’m sitting on the purple sofa in front of the window at home in Kansas City, looking out at the bare trees floating in a sea of amber leaves. It’s snowing! A small flurry of flakes begins dusting the deck like powdered sugar, sifting itself neatly onto each small leaf in the woods. It was a balmy sixty degrees in Texas; it’s now twenty-two outside my window here. The wind stings the skin.

Inside it’s warm. Though the snowfall is inaudible, its thrilling flutter of flakes curling, spinning,, swirling in dreamlike motion makes its own mixed-media music, a concerto for a full orchestra of sensations.

I still feel the silence these days later. And I recall I felt it on the drive north, too. In small moments here and there. Sitting in the passenger seat half-dreaming. the whoof-pouf, whoof-pouf, whoof-pouf of the wheels singing in rhythm. At the rest stop, waiting in line with fellow travelers and sharing greetings. Anywhere works, if I can remember that it’s always there waiting for me. For you. For any of us.

Whenever we like.