**GIVE me the splendid silent sun!

Please give our Wyoming Winter Guest Blogger some love and take a listen! :) It's a good one!
~Nomz and Sazaran

Listening to the birds whistle, sing and play outside of my window this afternoon, you would think it was the first day of Spring, not Sunday, October 04, 2009. Why are they so damn happy? The weather today is over cast, cold and yes snowing. And yet for the past few hours I couldn’t help but notice the little suckers dancing about as if there were no tomorrow. What’s up with that?

Steve Martin once said, “A day without sunshine is like, you know, night.” Very funny Steve, but I think you are on to something. When the sun goes down we want to “power down” and go into hibernation mode. Our metabolism slows to a crawl. So on the 129 days a year in Cheyenne when the sun doesn’t shine, it seems quite natural for us to put on our PJ’s and just sit around with Charlie Manson looks on our faces. It just seems like the right thing to do. Do the birds know something we don’t know?

Lately everyone it seems has been more than happy to tell me that this winter is going to be the worst in 50 years. Where did they get their information? And why be so perky about it! In the book, “The Rural Life” the author, Verlyn Klinkenborg makes a very interesting observation about Wyoming; He says, “In Wyoming people talk as though winter were “out there” even now, lurking not in time but in space, being prepared somewhere in a shop or factory, awaiting only final assembly and shipment to the proper address.” Are these rumors of a hard winter preparing us for the inevitable?

I must admit that I am a just a tad bit grumpy and irritable today because I love my sunshine. I need my daily serving of Vitamin D! But now as I look out my window, fog is rolling in, and the wind is starting to blow. Winter is just around the corner. Were the playful birds today trying to teach me? Today my little friends reminded me of a poem by Walt Whitman entitled “Give Me the Splendid Silent Sun”

GIVE me the splendid silent sun, with all his beams full-dazzling; Give me juicy autumnal fruit, ripe and red from the orchard; Give me a field where the unmow’d grass grows; Give me an arbor, give me the trellis’d grape; Give me fresh corn and wheat—give me serene-moving animals, teaching content; 5 Give me nights perfectly quiet, as on high plateaus west of the Mississippi, and I looking up at the stars; Give me odorous at sunrise a garden of beautiful flowers, where I can walk undisturb’d; Give me for marriage a sweet-breath’d woman, of whom I should never tire; Give me a perfect child—give me, away, aside from the noise of the world, a rural, domestic life; Give me to warble spontaneous songs, reliev’d, recluse by myself, for my own ears only; 10 Give me solitude—give me Nature—give me again, O Nature, your primal sanities!
So for now I am going to live every hour of the day and night like an unspeakable miracle, winter, spring, summer or fall!

*Ghost Blogger