A new craving for stillness

I have always appreciated moments of stillness, such as you encounter when you walk outside on Christmas morning.

But now, in 2012, I find that I have come to crave moments of stillness. I made this decision at 6 this morning when I took my coffee and my Sheltie pal Dixie outside for a few minutes on the glider. It was Aug. 19, not Christmas, but the stillness was there. Nothing moving, no wind, no sounds of animals, humans, planes or cars.

I enjoy a privileged viewing position on the brow of a hill, so that I can see eastern, southern, and western horizons, with carpets of streets and residences in the near and middle distances, then the bare, original surfaces of undeveloped foothills on the east and south, and then the ocean on the west.

It lets me see the way Earth is now, and the way it once was, 100 or 1,000 or 1 million years ago. The stillness I craved this morning was guaranteed only above the population line, from the way the Earth once was. Very little, if any, opportunity for stillness remains down there in the population carpet.

San Diego journalist Richard Louv, after he left The San Diego Union, earned international fame with his book, "Last Child in the Woods," arguing for the importance of the relationship between children and nature. This morning – and it wasn't the six-year-old in me – I felt an accelerated yearning, that I expect many adult Americans feel, for that relationship.

Of course Richard has beat me to it. I went to his Website to check the title of his "Last Child" book and discover he has a new book, "The Nature Principle: Human Restoration and the End of Nature-Deficit Disorder," which offers "a new vision of the future, in which our lives are as immersed in nature as they are in technology."

This morning, my yearning was that the human carpet take lessons on stillness from Earth itself. Earth can, after all, be very noisy, but not all day long and then only by unamplified natives or the necessities of fire, wind and water. Of course I will need Amazon to order Richard's book, and I can't not check the Web three or four times a day to see if Romney's tax returns have been revealed.

But this morning this new yearning appeared, and I can't not respond to it, either.