“I wanted something more than just privacy in the geographical sense. I wanted to sink roots into some replenishing philosophy.

“Took my daily walk at 4pm today in 89-degree frost . . . I paused to listen to the silence . . . The day was dying, the night being born ­­– but with great peace. Here were imponderable processes and forces of the cosmos, harmonious and soundless. Harmony, that was it! That was what came out of the silence — a gentle rhythm, the strain of a perfect chord, the music of the spheres, perhaps.

“It was enough to catch the rhythm, momentarily to be myself a part of it. In that instant I could feel no doubt of man’s oneness with the universe. The conviction came that that rhythm was too orderly, too harmonious, too perfect to be a product of blind chance — that, therefore, there must be purpose in the whole and that man was part of that whole and not an accidental off-shoot. It was a feeling that transcended reason; that went to the heart of man’s despair and found it groundless. The universe was a cosmos, not a chaos; man was as rightfully a part of that cosmos as were the day and night.

“I did take away something that I had not fully possessed before: appreciation of the sheer beauty and miracle of being alive, and a humble set of values. Civilization has not altered my ideas. I live more simply now, and with more peace.”
– Richard E. Byrd, Alone. This, from Byrd’s diary, was written during 1933-1934 when Byrd spent five months alone operating a meteorological station in Antarctica.*

What a beautiful description of a moment in time! A moment when Byrd felt completely in harmony with his inner and outer worlds. Look at the words he uses to evoke this moment and how simple they are—“peace,” “harmony,” “silence,” “gentle,” “rhythm.” Simple words, yes, but each of them evokes something in us, just as they did in the writer on that cold, quiet night so long ago. For him, they all combined to create “oneness”—a feeling he felt compelled to capture in words.

What a luminous passage! It reminds us that there simple but powerful words just waiting in all of us to be shared and savored. Write on!

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* Quoted from Heron Dance, a beautiful online blog devoted to creativity and the arts (https://herondance.org/antarctic-silence?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email)