The Quiet and the Peace

By Andrew R. Duckworth

I.

I once hated the quiet,
The playground of a broken mind
Through broken lenses
Looking on at a broken world.
The darkness would slither in,
Make its den, lay its eggs,
Coil around inside my head.
But even in the quiet,
My world was full of noise-
Constant voices and traffic horns,
God forbid the daily news,
Stew in the stewpot of grief,
The mother of anger
Swirling about and eating away
At the good.
I hated the quiet
When there really was no quiet.
I hated my perception of quiet,
Which was not quiet at all.
I never considered
Getting out of civilization,
That death trap
Containing little civility,
The mousetrap with the prize
Beckoning one on until the trap
Closes with no means of escape.

II.

Looking on at the mountains
In morning twilight,
There are no lights.
None.
The mountainsides are dark,
No artificial,
No facade of civility,
Just the nature that has existed
Since the beginning.
Those places, they aren’t tainted
By the sick pretending to be safe.
In nature, expectations shriek.
Expect the unexpected.
That is its magic,
It owes one nothing.
And yet, we owe it so much.
After all, are we not the ones
Who took plains away from the horse
And the bison to pave streets,
Build high rises,
And put up neon signs?
Are we not the ones who rerouted
Rivers and drilled through mountains?
In the mystery of nature,
One can find danger,
Particularly when one steps
Without respect.
One can also find peace.
One can find the quiet,
The true quiet,
The quiet that comes with a breeze
Through the mountain trees
Liberating the soul from the ‘civil.’

III.

The more I think of civilization,
The more I think about anger
And the more I think about hatred,
The two things civilization does best
Or so it seems.
I dream of a day
When I might enjoy a home
Near the mountains,
The ones with no lights,
The ones lacking artificiality.
For now, it’s the city,
The ‘civilized’ city.
But one day, I might grow the wings
Of an eagle and fly to the treetops
Of the mountain and feel the breeze
Through the mountain trees.
One day, I might run wild
In the fields with hooves
Marking my tracks.
One day, I might shed my humanity,
That thing that breeds ‘civility’
And traps the soul in a stone heart.

IV.

The quiet is hard to find,
The quiet that brings peace of mind,
True quiet, more easily found
In nature, rather than the glitter
And sparkle of the city.
It is not nature itself,
It only holds the quiet.
The quiet comes from the hand
That crafted nature,
Just as the hand crafted each,
Just as the hand crafted the horse,
Just as the hand crafted the bison,
The hand that worked the clay
From the mind that made the day.
There, in the safety of that Hand
Is the quiet, the peace.
These hands that I have?
Destructive at best.
I hold no special power,
I hold no heart of peace
Without calling on the Mind
Who gave us the beauty of nature,
The beauty that we are so quick
To upend in pursuit of a parking lot.

V.

There in the rawness of nature,
In the untouched by human hands
Lies the quiet.
And so, how does one find it
Amid the chaos of civilization?
Many times, I have conjured it
In my mind, the flowing streams
Through the calm valley feeding
The wildflowers fed on by the
Wild horses and the bison
Just there at the mountain’s edge
Where trees give way to rock
And the rock is blanketed by snow
And, from the top, you can see it-
The breadth of it all,
Nature as He crafted it,
The rolling hills
And the yellow plains
And the rivers, the lakes,
The forest, the meadow.
And then, that breeze, His voice.
Yes, in that lies the quiet.
In Him lies the quiet, the peace.
And in that peace, my soul can rest.