White Noise

We had another snow storm earlier this week that blanketed New York and surrounding areas in the Northeast with much more snow than we were expecting. The pictures above are from the day after, in Brooklyn Heights, as we took to the car-less streets admire the still life beauty that a big dusting of snow brings.

The best thing about a snow storm in New York is the quiet. Certainly there's the lack of noise when you eliminate cars (and their horns), the sheer volume of traffic and people that moves in and out of the city every day, the hustle and bustle of urban life. But the quiet is also a type of internal stillness, the 'walk in the woods' sense of hearing snow crunching underfoot, slowing down, actually paying attention to the environment all around instead of getting from point A to point B. Really opening your eyes. Observing. Listening.

Snow brings a kind of white noise to type A city, and, even if just for a day, creates a pause, a momentary shift of focus, a brief recognition and reverence of our very small presence in the much larger environment and eco-system of the natural world we actually live in.

I'm reading a beautiful book, "The View from Lazy Point", where the naturalist Carl Safina has the same effect as the snow; he makes you stop and pay attention to red-winged blackbirds the way that E.B. White let us observe life between swans and their cygnets in one of my favorite books "The Trumpet of the Swan". And as you're seeing these birds through his eyes, you're seeing your own relationship to the world, and the relationship between us and millions of other species on one planet that we all share. He writes:

"...Life is - more than anything else - a process; it creates, and depends on, relationships among energy, land, water, air, time and various living things....The red-wings call, listen, call again. One note is not music. It is what lies between the notes that makes the music, and what is between them is: their relationship. Relationships are the music life makes. Context creates meaning. Asking, "What is the meaning of life?' is the wrong question; it makes you look in the wrong places. The question is, 'Where is the meaning in life?' The place to look is: between..."

Life returned to 'normal' on Friday. Streets were plowed, people were commuting by train, bus and car, and the noise and energy of urban life in New York City was back. As the snow underfoot turns to sloppy slush, it becomes harder to feel that snow storm quiet, hear the white noise and feel our connection to the ecology of the natural world.

Of course it's still there, we just need to remember to consciously pause and look and listen for it. Between....