My job at the vacation this year was to lead the hike and I decided to help guide the youngsters on the less strenuous hike. Knowing we like to start with silence, I had to learn how to propose silence to a bunch of six year olds. I invited them to look and listen to the world around them and see what they noticed. I quickly noticed that what a child sees, they immediately need to share. So silence for them is to look and to tell someone what they just saw.

It is a great example of silence for me, that what you notice in the quiet isn't meant to be kept for you but to share. The end of the hike, one of the smallest of our crew came up to me and wanted to know if he could have my walking stick (a relic from Big Sur that I had found 6 years prior). Knowing the stick was nearly twice his height and thinking he meant he wanted it only for the vacation, I agreed to let him have it for the next two days. He paused, and perhaps recognizing my resistance to wanting to let the stick go fully, he asked with all seriousness, "but can I have this forever"? It blew me away that a child can have that kind of perspective and it was easy to give it to him, knowing he wanted it for better reasons than I did!