_by the river she rowed and rowed_ T. S. Eliot's memorable lines from the poem "Little Gidding" (from the Four Quartets): "We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time." And so maybe we know, when the silence is real, that each step we take is a heartbeat, a heartbeat we recognizes as belonging to our own heart. If we're lucky, we return to a place we never knew before or perhaps we never fully understood with new eyes, but I suppose the thing we seek had always been there. Something that can be seen between fragments of time, the way light glances off the winter river, between water and ice. Walking by the Concord River in winter, I am immersed between the conversations of Emerson and Thoreau and the more distant stories of sufi saints. Still seeking that light maybe. (Concord River in winter, by Old North Bridge, Concord, Massachusetts)