You may well be sick of bees. I, on the other hand, see them everywhere. At the botanical gardens we visited as a field trip last week (see photo, attached :)), there were bees. And they make a lot of noise :).

I confess: so do I. I buzz around doing this, babbling as I work. I buzz around on that, la-la-la-ing as I go. In other words, I talk too much. But at least I’m trying not to :).

In a presentation at the Summer Institute I help facilitate, a friend shared her presentation on the power of silence in the classroom. I loved it. She talked about silence (ironic, but she also had us be quiet, and listen to the silence. It was amazingly powerful. It wasn’t long, but the absence of extra noise somehow highlighted the lack of total silence.  Even a ‘quiet’ room was alive: there was the sound of the ethnographer writing in her journal, someone else’s keyboard clacking…  Not true ‘silence’ at all…

In fact, I can’t remember ‘hearing’ silence for a long time. Certainly not at work! My classes are rarely silent, something colleagues sometimes tease me about: ‘Wow, Britt, your classes are like barely controlled chaos.’ As they are :).

So I’m going to try harder. I’ll take up sitting still again (it waxes & wanes as a practice for me, something a Buddhist aspirant probably shouldn’t  admit…), and even go back to haiku for a bit, to cut out extra words in my work. Somehow that sounds as seductive as honey ~

And hey ~ even bees hibernate.