No Zoom Required

Life with Dave is up close and personal.
He doesn't believe in wearing gloves to garden or using a zoom lens when you can just go there.
So he takes me up to Mt. Hood for his birthday. Literally, up to Mt. Hood. 6,000 feet up.
And we sit quiet in the silence of the mountain and the contrast from our normal lives is astounding.
Because our lives are LOUD.
Four noisy children in a noisy neighborhood with a phone ringing off the hook business and constant traffic of friends and relatives coming and going and coming again.
With each new decibel of noise we smile wry at each other and turn down the hearing aids and keep going.
And on nights when the kids are re-enacting World War 2, and two females cats are in heat and broadcasting it to all the male cats in the vicinity and the males are responding with yowls that shake the marrow, and the neighbors are screaming at each other, and someone is practicing the piano in the living room, and the fire station down the hill is responding to a crisis, we muffle the hearing aids under the covers and pray for sanity.

So to sit in the silence of a mountain is nothing short of phenomenal.

I forgot that there existed such quiet in the world.
I forgot that to get down to the bare bones of things, one must be quiet.

I forgot that all the senses affect one another and that to be quiet alters my sight as well as my hearing.
So my husband, of a decade and a half, and I sit in the shadow of the mountain and don't speak.
We barely breath.
And the quiet is peace.
We carry the peace home to our noisy lives and try to live
in the shadow of the mountain.

"In repentance and rest is your salvation,
in quietness and trust is your strength."
Isaiah 30:15