Silence and Solitude

Last night, the snow began to fall. This morning, it looked like Narnia before Aslan, as winters tend to do around here. You expect to see the White Witch driving by on her sleigh.

Here is what it looked like last night, when the snow had begun falling:

Today, there were three inches of snow on the ground. (At least, I scraped three inches off the car.) I had originally planned to drive to the university, but the roads were covered with snow, so I thought it would be better to stay home. The bushes looked like this:

A day alone in a quiet house: that's heaven, for an introvert. It was lovely, just sitting and working. I haven't done that for a while. I've had so many errands to run, so many things to do. I feel as though I'm always going somewhere, always rushing around. But I need peace and silence and solitude to do my best work. That's what I got today.

Here I am, working on this snowy day:

Tomorrow, I have to take a bus to New York, and it will be a busy weekend. I'm glad I got to spend at least one day like this. When I get back, I have to look at my life, try to figure how to have more days like today. Because these are the sorts of days I need to write. I haven't been writing at all for a while now, partly because I haven't had the time, but partly because I haven't had the peace of mind I need to write the sort of thing I write, the way I write it. You seen, I need to hear the story. And I hear it best in silence, or when there's some sort of noise I don't need to pay much attention to. Some classical music, the sound of driving. (I have a story coming out in Asimov's Science Fiction that I wrote on a bus on the way back from New York.) I'm not the sort of person who can write in a public place.

And my life is a very busy, public life. I teach seventy students, I receive between fifty and a hundred emails a day. Sometimes, I can barely keep up.

I need to incorporate solitude and silence into my life . . .