There are three places I’ve been that I’ve loved the most, but not in the way most travelers recount their memories.
Each remains a palpable memory, not because they yielded an Eiffel Tower, Cancun beach, or haute cuisine New York restaurant; but on the contrary, a stunning silence, sweeping me out of myself and a landscape weighted with human duplicity.
In those moments I floated, unmoored from gravity, a wanderer among the stars —part of everything that has been or ever will be, glimpsing eternity beneath all mortal breath, my entrance into epiphany.
It happened first for me years ago at Arlington National Cemetery, the white rows glimmering in the rays of early morning sun.
The second at Kitty Hawk, where the Wright brothers’ fragile dream first lifted from the earth. I stood alone, wombed in stillness, as if the air itself remembered that first exultant rise.
Most memorable of all, traveling eastward from Edinburgh, and suddenly they unfurled, the Highlands, spectacular in their rolling verdure. I stepped from the car into a silence so immense it seemed alive.
In its haunting stillness, I understood Emily Brontë’s fierce passion for the Yorkshire moors, resounding in her poetry and prose:
“you are not broken for needing stillness
you are not flawed for shrinking from noise
your mind is simply attuned to something different
something more aligned with the quiet current
that flows beneath all of existence.”
Like Emily, I exalt in that stillness, shaking hands with Eternity.
Brimmings: up from the well 