To Risk or Not To Respite
The risk to find quiet.
The risk to find time.
The risk to miss out.
The risk to be.
The risk to not be.
The risk of losing time.
The risk to take ‘a welcomed break.’
As a momma, wife, and self employed being there are risks.
The other day, Victoria wanted to read to me a bit more. Which is lovely, as I love her little voice. She talks so much, lol. So much. When we hike she likes to talk, when she is in the kitchen, bathroom, bedroom, hallway, outside, inside…. She talks out loud.
Jumps around and likes to make herself known.
I told her 15 min and then my time. I needed time. Time. Time. Silence. I am not sure why she doesn’t embrace it as Chris and I are fairly quiet beings. And that might be just why she likes to talk so much. The opposite scene of her parents… lol
Is she filling a void or attempting to bring balance in a space. 1 quiet and 1 talker. So i guess in writing this, I am realizing that I need to be less quiet with her bc she does enjoy it when I talk. When we converse.
Yes, when I teach, I talk. But when I am home, I am quiet, unless I have questions or have something to share. This post is teaching me a good deal.
My dear friend Millie, once shared. ‘I appreciate our comfortable silence when we spend time.’
This is something I strive to teach Victoria, with her talking and my silence. I will experiment in conversing a bit more and see what happens. Will we find the ability to have a comfortable silence with one another?
“The most difficult thing to understand during conversation is silence.”
Quiet time as a parent or non-parent, with everything turned off. Technology, washing machines, dryers, turn it all off. Even the fans.
There is something so rich in this quiet.
It is my place of Respite.
I like to think that the studio is a bit of a Respite to others.
One of my other favorite places to find a welcomed break is to go away in the mountains.
We just returned from my 43rd bday trip out to Marshall. The picture enclosed was the most remarkable view. There is always something about being in a cabin in the woods. You can’t hear the traffic so much in the woods. Of course, there was laughter and talk amongst us. But there was also silence. Mostly in the forest. And then our last evening was full of wind and rain and what I like to think of as, Mother Nature having a little fit outside, so 3 nights of silence and 1 little stirring. It was pretty cool.
”Among the other reasons he offered for setting out on his famous experiment in self-reliance in July 1845, Henry David Thoreau went to Walden to get a good night’s sleep. He sought respite from industrial modernity by calibrating his rhythms to those of nature, or what he famously called “marching to the beat of a different drummer.”’ -Benjamin Reiss
I encourage these days, as you listen to the wind, which isn’t always the quietest, to feel it enter one ear and out the other.
To listen for the silence within the silence.
~ Maktub
