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  I take long walks up into the hills behind my place almost every day now. Yesterday with a light snow falling, hardly a breath of wind, and the quiet stillness of the wintry forest all around I was so suffused with a sense of healthy open air well-being that I didn’t want the hike to end and took numerous trail branchings simply to prolong the moment. It reminded me of childhood and playing endlessly outside all day in the cold and snow and only the waning light, hunger, or a parent’s call putting an end to the fun.  

  Anyway, home I made tea and sat down to finish reading Aldous Huxley’s The Doors Of Perception. 

  A few pages from the end I came upon this passage: 

  “We talk,” [Goethe] wrote in middle life, “far too much. We should talk less and draw more. I personally should like to renounce speech altogether and, like organic Nature, communicate everything I have to say in sketches. That fig tree, this little snake, the cocoon on my window sill quietly awaiting its future—all these are momentous signatures. A person able to decipher their meaning properly would soon be able to dispense with the written or the spoken word altogether. The more I think of it, there is something futile, mediocre, even (I am tempted to say) foppish about speech. By contrast, how the gravity of Nature and her silence startle you, when you stand face to face with her, undistracted, before a barren ridge or in the desolation of the ancient hills.”

  And then Huxley continues, finishing the paragraph: “We can never dispense with language and the other symbol systems; for it is by means of them, and only by their means, that we have raised ourselves above the brutes, to the level of human beings. But we can easily become the victims as well as the beneficiaries of these systems.”—Aldous Huxley, The Doors Of Perception.

  What beauty! Outside and inside!

  “We talk far too much!” I love that, and then the sublime: “…the cocoon on my window sill quietly awaiting its future!”

  AUMMmmmmmm….

  Life IS all there is….

  Precious, isn’t it!….