I've just started to read Soulcraft by Bill Plotkin.
Just the forward, so far, by Thomas Berry.
He writes of "the springtime singing of the birds, the summertime showers, the autumn ripening, and the winter quiescence."
Quiescence
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
may refer to:
- In fluid mechanics, it refers to the state of a fluid that lacks any movement
- The G0 phase of a cell in the cell cycle; quiescence is the state of a cell when it is not dividing
- In neuron bursting, it refers to the quiet phase of a spike train when a neuron is not emitting bursts or singlets
- In plants, it is the non-active state of a seed in which the only requirement for seed germination is water and oxygen; Contrast with Dormancy
- In behavioral neuroscience or zoology, quiescence refers to a behavior where an animal is vigilant but relaxed and immobile. This may be related to a recuperative response after an encounter with a predator
- In volcanology, when an active volcano is not actually erupting
- An electronic amplifier or filter is said to be in a quiescent state when no signal is applied to its input
- Quiescence search, In Game searching (adversarial search) in artificial intelligence, a quiescent state is one in which a game is considered stable and unlikely to change drastically the next few plays
- In computer science is a data item that is not actively being changed
I feel this. Do you? Right now. All I want is to stay home. Why go out and do all these things and see all these people when I could stay home and practice piano, and cook, and read, and feel like I have contentment and everything I need in abundance?
And even that is fairly busy. I could go further into not-doing. The autumn leaves are almost all gone. The winter quiescence is drawing me in...
Thanks to Steve for this NY Times article about how parts of France used to just go to sleep for winter: “Seven months of winter, five months of hell,” they said in the Alps.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/25/opinion/25robb.html?_r=1
Yes. I am abandoning projects that don't feel fruitful, letting them go despite a consequence here or there. I told this to my acupuncturist - who is all about slowing down in the winter - and he told me a story about how his pear tree, one spring, had a thousand beautiful little flowers. Two weeks later it had a thousand perfect little fruits. Two weeks after that half of them just fell off. The remaining fruits developed beautifully.
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