Quiet July 13, 2014

I am a member of two book clubs, and I often find myself sinking into the quiet of Almost Pi for one of my two monthly obligate reads.  This weekend I have been immersed in Elizabeth Gilbert’s “The Signature of All Things”.  As much as I didn’t like her earlier book, “Eat Pray Love”, and as resistant as I was to reading this new one, I was quickly sucked into the story of adventurers, circa 1800, who traveled the world to unearth new botanicals for passion and profit.  Alma Whitaker, the scholarly daughter of one such remarkable man and now the world’s expert in mosses, meets Ambrose Pike, who has just returned from two decades in Mexico and Guatemala where he studied orchids and produced exquisite lithographs of them. 

Alma asks him, “What would you like to do [now]?”  To which Pike responds, “I would like never to travel again.  I would like to spend the rest of my days in a place so silent – and working at a pace so slow – that I would be able to hear myself living.”

I know the feeling.  Pi is the place where I can hear myself living.