But what is more beautiful than silence? It needs nothing more than itself to be enough. Last Saturday in the woods they were watching, I saw them watching a tree whose leaves had changed to the palest gold. In a silence the branches shivered and a single leaf would fall like a sigh to the ground. He lifted his phone to capture this and she pushed his hand down, again, in silence. The gesture, like a prayer. Another leaf fell then, perhaps in gratitude or recognition. It did not, it does not matter that it would have fallen anyway.

What do the trees know, besides slow time and patience? What do they know?

Later when I had emerged from the woods and returned home, I found I had taken some of the silence with me, and here it is now for you: