“In the prolonged winters of the past, country dwellers had to live with silence.   Except for domestic bustle, and the subdued noises of animals pent in barn and sheepfold, the white world surrounded them with a silence at once healing and forbidding, spacious and confining…. Never mind that silence, however lengthy, is preferable to the trivia that these technological marvels can bring into the remotest farmhouse today.”  Lee Pennock Huntington, Hill Song, A Country Journal       

 Not only for me is this silence of which Huntington writes preferable, but it is a necessity if I am to hear the still small voice of sanity and meaning for living out these days.  The mercury bouncing up and down the thermometer marks these midwinter days on Piney Mountain.  Enough frigid temperatures, however, remind me that spring is still a few weeks distant.  Often enough, the night sky has been cloud-free, bringing a comradeship with distant suns and planets whirling noiselessly in the starry universe.   Viewing them from earth in winter challenges the imagination.  Ninety odd million miles at the end of its invisible Solar tether our planet soars through space on its yearly axis around the sun, spinning endlessly on its tilted axis.  That it has done so for eons with perfect timing amidst billions of solar systems is for me reassurance that faith in the Great Timekeeper of the universe remains a solid bedrock for living, no matter earthquakes, tsunamis, and the vagaries of nature.