I started out writing this post with the thought of peace and tranquility on my mind. Then listening to the radio I heard the fact that the Senate cleared the way for a vote on an insider-trading ban for the members and the staffs of congress.

“Cleared the way” I’ve got news for Congress and the rest of the takers in government. There is already a law against insider trading. Apparently there are some loopholes that congressional members and staff that had special knowledge because of legislation upon which they were working could circumvent the law and make a few insider bucks.

No wonder congress has an abysmal approval rating.

I keep wondering if we the electorate are lazy or ignorant? I think it’s both. We have, for far too long, let congress operate without the over-site of the people. The elected members of congress and much of their staff see themselves as special and in many cases above the laws and the rules and regulations that the rest of us must follow.

Each one of us, by ourselves, can do nothing but stand up for what is right and shout into the density of darkness, but collectively we are powerful and we can change the corruption of the system. It begins with changing our congressmen and women and letting all representatives know we expect them to serve for the greater good of us and not create a career for themselves.

I want to share with you some places that may not be of your choice or current experience. They are based solely on my interests and to me they are profound.

These are places of extreme quiet, where silence and nothing are one and you cannot tell them apart. Places where only nature speaks and her sound is deafening when no other audible intrusion is near.

One place is on a silent river. Where portions neither ripple nor descend through noisy cataracts, but carry liquid volumes in the stillness of deep flows and where it is far enough away from man’s concoctions that the only thing you think you hear are your own thoughts, but they aren’t.

If you’ve never been to such a place and find yourself in it, there will come wonderment, a revelation, a spiritual attunement, a surprise appreciation of the empathetic knowledge that only stillness engenders in a singular moment of time.

The first time I found such silence was on the Green River in Utah as I rafted in a quiet eddy pool and found myself in involuntary prayer with nature whose sacristy I entered and then sustained by the choice of benevolent thought.

The second time was at night alone at the edge of a lake in the Allagash wilderness of Maine. The stars have a noticeable brilliance when civilization is far away. They also have a sound that man rarely hears for we occupy a space of things and doing in the Cosmos of life.

I know that science has learned much from the music of the spheres in the vast cacophony of the heavens. I know that religions promote silence to reach the unreachable. I know that the frigid stillness of winter creates a cocoon where sound will not enter because of density.

What I didn’t know until I experienced it was the joy that silence gives the listener and that robust laughter needs no sound and God needs no dogma. The thoughts you think are yours, but aren’t, are God’s. He talks to all of us, as us, in the stillness of life.

Yesterday morning the temperature was six degrees. Later I had a fire going and felt safe after a cold winter’s night.

The warmth of a long ago sun spreadsinto my room as a log fire dissolves its way to ash giving back the heat and light of many seasons’ growth. Fluid flames dance in a flickering grace of form and orange light. Heat is the result. Light a soft byproduct.

A few feet away was the cold. It is a stinging cold with only a window glass to hold it back. It’s double glass, a bulwark of silica that another temperature and time turned into a transparent glazing of clarity and protection.

I grew up in old houses with single panes of flawed glass. Frost would decorate the panes into a translucent crystal of art, but not now. Modern houses are too tight for nature’s cryogenic beauty to seep in and paint the panes with a cameo of cold. Too bad! How many kids today will miss the vision of feathered frost on the inside of a windowpane where they can scratch their own design into the thin sheet of ice crystals.

Just beyond my outer pane is an astringent cold that if you stepped outside without protection it would burn with negative degrees, blister the skin, force he eyes to tears and tighten the inner nose when breath is necessary. It’s an arctic tight. Not a tight of clothes and layers, but a tightness of breath. It’s like an invisible contorting serpent; a tightening Arctic snake that constricts with every breath. Its tightness smothers and suffocates in a vapor of ever constricting cold.
But I’m inside and warm and I feel safe. Proximity to potential danger seems to do that. Other dangers will evoke a similar feeling. High winds, flooding, blizzards, and even summer heat can harm, but if we feel safe, protected while near the danger, then the rest of the feeling and fear basks in the comfort of illusion for safety is only as good as the protection that holds back the danger.

The glass in the window keeps me feeling safe and sustains my sense of comfort. The cold on the other side sets a tension for possible attack, but cannot penetrate the timid barrier of wood and glass. It is the knowing fierceness of potential danger that keeps me in the fort of comfort.