Last week I took a walk, a late-afternoon break from the house, just up the back path. Vertical walls of hill were highlighted, sparkling from sun on snow, silver-gold, and the stream thrust and carved deeply between the slopes, water murmuring and tinkling through ice and stone. I went down into the dell and listened for a while. You can hear sounds back into the past, sounds from maybe one hundred, two hundred years ago, by listening to the rush of the stream. The water not only taught everything how to make sounds and what is beautiful, but also recorded soundtracks of events through time. You have to listen closely, your ear intently on the body of the sound of the stream. A bit ghostly, chilling.

"Traditions are borne by the power of an initial thrust that hurls acts and ideas across the centuries." - Chaim Potok

"Our two souls therefore, which are one,
Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
Like gold to aery thinness beat" - John Donne, from A Valediction Forbidding Mourning

"The closest I ever got to the sound I hear in my mind was on the Blonde on Blonde album. It's that thin, wild mercury sound. It's metallic and bright gold, with whatever that conjures up." - Bob Dylan

This week I was in New York City, another place of vertical hills, wild metallic sounds, and spooky action connecting planes and angles.