The Silence of Snow

There is a certain silence in snow.
Profound?
Let me back track.

It's the week before Christmas and EVERYTHING is going crazy.
The people, the malls, the travellers, the communters.
You name it.
Just have a look around.
Everyone is frantic.

Then it snows.

Everything has to slow down, lest it run into, over or just down because of the speed at which is was going.
One little snowflake multiplied by a ka-zillion causes a bunch of humans (and animals too I suppose) to slow down.
Even stop (because the roads are closed for it's too dangerous to continue).
Then, with stopping, there's silence.

We walk slower because of the snow.
We still wonder at the fact that these little flakes of frozen water are descending from on high.
How we still test our breath to see how long it lasts in the cold air when it's snowing.
Though the wind blows, seemingly a little more fiercely, when it snows it's all quiet when it does.
A different kind of silence.

As I begin to imagine my tour for next year I am reminded that much of it might be in silence. I will have to road, music or what ever else I may use to occupy my brain while I travel. But this is a solo journey. Most of all it will be interesting to be in chosen silence.

Right now, most of my day is with noise. Lots of noise.
My job is noisy (walk down the hall of 6 Bond North during our lab operation hours and you'll know exactly what I mean).
The other techs and I tend to be noisy, recently it's be cause of the chocolate high we've been on because of Christmas treats.
Really, I've never been known to be a quiet one.
My commute is noisy. The bus is noisy, the people on the bus are noisy (mostly talking on phones) the subway is especially noisy. The downtown streets at rush hour are noisy.
What's it like to be quiet?
What is quiet, really?

Over the past couple of years I've been practicing (oh boy is it hard to practice sometimes) the art of being quiet.
Not having any music, the radio sports program I listen to when I get home, or the 680 news before bed and just being quiet. I'm doing something, like reading, a crossword puzzle or surfing the web but I'm quiet.
It gets hard to do sometimes. We seem to need noise in our lives. I'm not sure why.

Sometimes in the quiet I'm much more productive than when there is background noise.
Sometimes I'm tired so without any noise I go to sleep. Oh dear.

I'm so looking forward to hearing things that we'd consider part of silence. Like the flowing water sound of a creek in the mountains near Prague. Maybe the sound of a canal boat going down the river through Prague. Or the sound of the ocean moving against the piers in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Or my horse at the Three Bars Ranch taking me up a mountain side.

Those are all silences I hope to hear.

Quietly, on to the next....