Pure Poetry

Most of you know that I spent a significant amount of time living in Tanzania, East Africa.  It was an incredible time and place in my life, one that ignited and inspired so much in me.  It was there when I first read the incredible book, 'West With The Night' by Beryl Markham about her life as the first female bush pilot in the 1930's.  This book is pure poetry and (along with Peter S. Beagles "The Last Unicorn") one of the most beautiful books I have ever read.  If you don't take my word for it, take Ernest Hemigway's - he was so impressed by her writing he wrote the forward.  Here is just a sample of the magic that was Markham.  Enjoy.




There are all kinds of silences and each of them means a different thing. There is the silence that comes with morning in a forest, and this is different from the silence of a sleeping city. There is silence after a rainstorm, and before a rainstorm, and these are not the same. There is the silence of emptiness, the silence of fear, the silence of doubt. There is a certain silence that can emanate from a lifeless object as from a chair lately used, or from a piano with old dust upon its keys, or from anything that has answered to the need of a man, for pleasure or for work. This kind of silence can speak. Its voice may be melancholy, but it is not always so; for the chair may have been left by a laughing child or the last notes of the piano may have been raucous and gay. Whatever the mood or the circumstance, the essence of its quality may linger in the silence that follows. It is a soundless echo.



-Beryl Markham, West With the Night


Love,
Brittany & Scott