Don't have anywhere else to really post this but I'm trying to get back to this part of me. At night I walked in forest over hills through shallow water going nowhere, but seeking solitude seeking silence seeking something I called grace Even in rural Pennsylvania it was always too loud— certainly among others— to hear it so I wandered away from light and noise into clutches of dark trees where I always felt home I looked starward chest aching I begged the sky and the earth and the trees to fill me with grace— which I understood as the end of yearning the quiet within I couldn't find without If I got far enough out where stars brightened I sometimes caught a moment of true silence (or close enough) and I'd think— there it is let me take this grace into my heart and carry it with me back into the din In that moment I was the sky and the earth and the trees and I yearned for nothing Then on a distant road a roaring truck would pierce the moment and I would grieve to have touched grace and lost it again How gossamer a thing is grace, I thought, to live only in perfect silence how unjust that it be so elusive Of course I was a fool mistaking solitude for sanctity silence for peace stillness for grace