Wednesday, October 7, 2009

Quiet

As previously mentioned, I live in NYC.  Smack in the middle, actually, and so it's usually pretty noisy and hectic.  But today was one of those days where I found real quiet and peace even in the middle of all the craziness.

This evening when I took the baby out (and by "the baby" I mean my golden retriever) to the park, I went to sit by the small pond not far from where we enter the park.  There, I saw several types of migrating ducks feeding, and also a great blue heron fishing.  We sat and watched for a while.  It always surprises me to see things like this in the city -- it's a 3 foot tall bird about 5 blocks from my apartment!  But there it was, and so we watched it.

On our way home, we passed a man staring at the top of a tree.  So of course, we also stared at the tree.  In the tree was a hawk.  A big one.  This is actually one of the pair of hawks that lives near the park. You could see it preening and stretching its wings -- it was lovely to see something so majestic and so wild.

On our walk tonight, the moon was out and beginning to wane.  We passed a man with this enormous telescope set up looking at the night sky.  It's pretty hard to see a lot of stars in the city, and that's something I always love about getting out of the urban environment, but tonight I got to look through his telescope and see a close up view of Jupiter and several of its moons.  I don't know why, but it made me foolishly happy.  I'm going to go to bed and dream of stars.

2 comments:

  1. Hi! I don't think I've commented before, but I found your blog via LFCA & have been reading ever since. This post made ME foolishly happy along with you!

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  2. When we lived in Seoul, I desperately missed the stars, wildlife, grass...all of that. We flew back to NM for Christmas one year and I remember just sitting out on the porch staring at the stars, soaking it all in. You miss them when you don't see them that often :).
    I love those days when nature intrudes on city life - it feels almost otherworldly.

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