Item: 1 copy of Desert Solitaire, by Edward Abbey

This book is about the seasons spent by the author as a park ranger in what is now Arches National Park, in the days when it was a less easily accessible area.  The book is beautiful and mean and thoughtful and scary.  Only pretty much all of that passed me by this time, because I am still stuck on something from page x of the introduction:

Those were all good times, especially the first two seasons when the tourist business was poor and the time passed extremely slowly, as time should pass, with the days lingering and long, spacious and free as the summers of childhood.  There was time enough for once to do nothing, or next to nothing...

So I remember certain days I've had that could be described that way:  days when snowstorms prevented me from being able to go anywhere, days sitting on a rocking chair on the porch in slow intermittent conversations.

But this is so not what we value, not in my circles anyway.  Having a schedule crammed full means that you are active and popular, and these are good words.  Having nothing to do makes you at least unimportant, possibly even a loser.  I think so many people fear a day of empty space because they fear what they don't know.  I know people who go on vacation and right away they're looking for wireless so they can check messages.  I understand the sudden panic at having lost all the signals of your usual life.  I understand the dread of being bored.  Except I think that it's only at first when you shed all the trappings that the time seems empty.

It fills back up again.  Edward Abbey, out in the desert, spent the days writing and exploring canyons and helping run cattle.  It's the same thing with silence, when I allow it in.  When I first turn off the radio, all I hear is something missing, a lack of stimulus.  But then, minutes later, I've started to hear different things:  a car door, the voices of my neighbors, a bird singing.

It reminds me of something Anne Morrow Lindbergh described in Gift from the Sea:

It is as if in parting one actually did lose an arm.  And then, like the star-fish, one grows it anew:  one is whole again, complete and round.