It’s the rest of the week. How about some quietude?

Quietude is so much more than quiet, more than silence. The Cambridge Dictionary defines quietude as a “state of being calm and peaceful”. Something experiential, something that captures our senses.

If quietude were a color, Sherman-Williams has determined it to be a lovely shade of ocean-mossy-green. If it were a sound, perhaps it would be the gentle lapping of waves on a shore after a storm. Maybe it smells like patchouli. And tastes like fresh spring water.

The best place I know to experience what quietude feels like is God’s natural world.

Last Friday, people all over North America as far south as Alabama were treated to a nighttime display of the Northern Lights—thanks to unusually strong solar flares.

I have long wanted to see this incredible natural phenomenon, but, sadly, I did not find out until a day too late. It has been bittersweet to see all the pictures and imagine what it must have been like to stand under that sky.

Daniel told me about it. He told me how the experience felt like rest—how it set the world right somehow.

Wendell Barry captures my sentiments well in these words taken from his poem Sabbaths 2001.

Ask the world to reveal its quietude—-not the silence of machines when they are still, but the true quiet by which birdsongs, trees, bellworts, snails, clouds, storms became what they are and are nothing else.

Wendell Barry

May your rest be sweet,

Alicia

The Dwelling Well

Quietude