Oct. 18, 2008 - The Joy of Silence

I suppose I'm luckier than most, especially given the current state of the economy. I'm not only still working, I get to work almost entirely at home. I do contract work for the company I retired from a couple of years ago, and since their home offices are more than a hundred miles from where I live, they graciously allow me to do my thing right here. It has lots of obvious advantages (I pick my own hours, there's no commute, no traffic, no office politics, etc.). Still, there are distractions. For one thing, my wife has long been a "political junkie" (me too, I guess, but not quite as addicted as she). During the day, there is only one TV channel that she watches - MSNBC. And since this just happens to be the most active election year in decades, things can get pretty rowdy around here.

Let's just say that my wife is not a Sarah Palin fan (neither am I, for that matter) and leave it at that. The point is that with the TV not very far away from this computer, I hear a lot of politically provocative stuff. Let's face it - this has become a bit more than the usual "silly season" we go through every 4 years. The noise and the nonsense just seem to go on and on. So sometimes I just have to escape.

On one such day last week, I was hiking around a favorite pond when I spotted a young blue heron sitting on a partially submerged log. Much to my amazement, he (or she) allowed me to get fairly close. They're normally very skittish. I sat there on the bank firing away for quite some time. Finally, I stopped and we both just sat there, taking in the warm fall afternoon. And more importantly, taking in the silence. It was absolutely wonderful. Every now and then the bird would look my way, probably just to see if I'd moved. But I couldn't help but think that maybe he was trying to tell me something, that perhaps being the "smarter" species wasn't all it was cracked up to be. He, after all, didn't know the name of a single politician.