“Nothing can be more useful to a man than a determination not to be hurried. When we are unhurried and wise, we perceive that only great and worthy things have any permanent and absolute existence, that petty fears and petty pleasures are but the shadow of the reality.
- Henry David Thoreau, Walden

We cannot be happy if we expect to live all the time at the highest peak of intensity. Happiness is not a matter of intensity but of balance and order and rhythm and harmony.
     Music is pleasing not only because of the sound but because of the silence that is in it: without the alternation of sound and silence there would be no rhythm.
-       Thomas Merton, No Man Is An Island

Style is a very simple matter: it is all rhythm. Once you get that, you can't use the wrong words. But on the other hand here am I sitting after half the morning, crammed with ideas, and visions, and so on, and can't dislodge them, for lack of the right rhythm. Now this is very profound, what rhythm is, and goes far deeper than words. A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it; and in writing (such is my present belief) one has to recapture this, and set this working (which has nothing apparently to do with words) and then, as it breaks and tumbles in the mind, it makes words to fit it. But no doubt I shall think differently next year.
-       Virginia Wolfe, Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West: Love Letters

Paddling in northern wilderness, particularly on the Barrens, gradually falling under the influence of the rhythms of the natural world, the traveller submerges into a different time space reality.

The living world, the animals, the birds, the very winds, storms, and lastly the ground itself, seems in a constant state of flux and movement. The caribou are ever wandering over the country, day and night. The wolves, the foxes, even the tiny lemming roams and migrates and passes, it seems, never resting. The birds migrate and change, are here today and silently gone tomorrow. The fish appear and disappear, ever migrating, moving from the lakes up the rivers and back again. The weather is never constant for a day – sunshine, storms, and always the winds are blowing and herding the distraught clouds across the sky. The gray rocks crack and crumble; the land flows and creeps; the greater the depth into the earth the slower the rhythm and the movement but always it is there, inexorable, mighty and timeless. The coasts are slowly emerging from the sea, but the evidence is perceptible; the great glaciers far to the north grind down to the ocean. The lakes are retreating, and the trees and muskeg follow them. The rivers eat and groan in their labors as they devour the banks and with their moving boulders grind away at their rapids and falls. In this macrocosm of change and flux is man. He too must catch the strange beat or perish; the Idthen-eldeli wandering, wandering, hunting, pursuing, migrating north in the fall, south in the summer; the Padlimiut endlessly traveling, changing their camps here and there from lake to lake, river to river, caribou-crossing to caribou-crossing, hunting, fishing, searching. . .
- Sleeping Island, PG Downes

The sound of the waters is audible to every ear, but there is other music in these hills, by no means audible to all. To hear even a few notes of it you must first live here for a long time, and you must know the speech of hills and rivers. Then on a still night, when the campfire is low and the Pleiades have climbed over rimrocks, sit quietly and listen for a wolf to howl, and think hard of everything you have seen and tried to understand. Then you may hear it –- a vast pulsing harmony –- its score inscribed on a thousand hills, its notes the lives and deaths of plants and animals, its rhythms spanning the seconds and the centuries.
- Aldo Leopold, Sand County Almanac

“The people I have known on the water – the old timers I knew – eased with the winds. Do you think they live high stress? No. They lived simple. Their bodies even moved with it. They knew a rhythm and a tempo – different from this hard driving tempo we are into on the beltways. Wheels going to work. Drivin’.

            “I once watched an old guy adze out a helm. Adze it out. I watched his rhythm. I was blown away watching him. He worked that adze down that whole keel. Whack. Whack. All day long. When you talk to someone like that, or hang out with them, their whole rhythm of stories, of song, their segue from song to story, is all in that beautiful simple balance. So I try to get hold of that in my songs, and in the way I live. It is so important.”
            - from my interview of folksinger and Chesapeake River advocate Tom Wisner.

After our interview, I wrote Tom a letter and mentioned that his thoughts on rhythm had been on my mind. He responded, in part, with the following:

      Our modern world presents many demanding, schedules that simply don’t fit into mine. I need to be watchful always that I don’t get trapped in someone's deadline. I believe your time is your lifeline! I have my own rhythms. They are deeply engrained; built right in at birth : a product of the life of the middle Chesapeake and the gentle repetitive cadence in the language of my mother’s people.

     The Rock Island creek runs down to James River, on to Chesapeake and out to the sea. I have spent my life writing my song out of those fundamental rhythms. Each time I return to them through my songs, I am home!

A key issue with creative work is time. Quality versus quantity. Do you rush it out the door before its ready? Frédéric Back, the subject of the first interview in the first issue of Heron Dance, a man who later became a friend as well as an inspiration, talked frequently about time.

It took about five years to make the film The Man Who Planted Trees. Continuous work. There are about twenty thousand drawings in the film. Even the last film I did – The Mighty River – I worked for four years to make it closer to the message it should carry. I find it is fantastic to spend a long time writing a book or working on a piece of art. If you want a book to be something who really gives, who is a kind of gift to humanity, you should work on that a long time. Not just write and push it to the publisher.

Jean Giono took twenty-three years to write The Man Who Planted Trees. It ended up to be only seven pages of typewritten text. . . When you come to the end, when you see the beginning very different. You have to change many parts of the book. You make a kind of psychic work on your book or on your film. I think that is important. I think it is better to go less at speed, but think more over, and take more out, in order to make the thing more useful and positive.
  - Frédéric Back, animator, creator of the film The Man Who Planted Trees for which he received an Oscar.  Heron Dance interview.

Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance,
And there is only the dance.
-   T.S. Eliot, from “Burnt Norton”,
the first of the Four Quartets,
republished in Eliot’s Collected Poems.

If we cannot wait,
we cannot know the
     right time to move.

 If we cannot be still,
our actions will have
     gathered no power.
- Friends of Silence