Outside/In

1.
A wintry blast is coming, and the birds know it.  The bluebirds arrived earlier than usual; downy and pileated woodpeckers have joined the smaller songbirds at the seed bell; a friend gathers old sheets for her garden.  And I sit at a screen and then stand at a window looking out, looking in, ruminating about motion and stillness.

2.
I don't smile much, not because I'm unhappy (I am mostly happy) or because I'm stand-offish (though I am an introvert), but because my face and I just don't smile.  We never have much.  Stillness is something I value, and a certain insularity. 

3.
In "Sketch the Shadows," blogger and poet Benjamin Vogt wrote yesterday, "There are places for silence, moments in our days that we require, not that we want, but that we absolutely need.  And the more we have them, the closer we get to ourselves and the world."  And yesterday, biologist and blogger David Haskell ended his post titled "Robert Pinsky on movement and grunting" with this: "At a time when our lives often revolve around uploads and downloads to 'the cloud,' with physicality reduced so often in our culture to tasteless gluttony and tawdry lust, his emphasis on artful embodiment was refreshing.  Occupy: your body.  I wonder how much of this embodiment can be captured in online videos?  So asks the blogger through his Ethernet cable, coming to your Android (aye, language is telling).  Homo sapiens, let's be the lightning that connects cloud to ground."

4.
This morning, I viewed a New York Times slide show featuring a cantilevered home above a Pittsburgh glass factory, its wall of glass facing busy city, river, bridge, and I watched an animated Van Gogh Starry Night, the swirling forms of the canvas activated by the touch of a finger, and I find myself now thinking about screens, and silence, and movement.

6.
My house is silent, but pileated woodpeckers drum outside, and fragments of call and response answer in my mind as I wander through morning reading and wonder: what is the bridge that moves me so from momentary glimpse to momentary glimpse, flashing like lightning before storm, and then stillness?