At River-Level

Strawberries are still coming on and peppers abound because with attention and tenderness, the garden gives everything it can. Once the harvest is over, does the garden reach a point where attention and tenderness is no longer required? Does it get what it needs, then saving up whatever nutrients are left over for the next go around? Retracting into itself? Retreating underground? Readying for the deep sleep?

So what I am asking is, with no point of crises, no destination, no drive or need to cross the river to the other side, when do we experience the happiness and beauty that rockets us past worldly understanding unto the realm of what is felt as home?

Every morning I made my way down a steep embankment to the river. The same fallen tree was there on which to rest. The same stones were arranged in a small circle on the bank as if to designate a fire, yet offering no proof that a fire had ever been burning there. There was nothing to hear but the rushing water and despite looking for clues to the contrary, every morning the scene was almost exactly the same. But on the last morning, the very same morning I had danced with the black bears, something was very different at the river side. Cairns were stacked here and there in the river and I felt . . . transgressed.

The river is not mine, nor the banks or the stones, nor the small poustinia created for the briefest of time. In fact, it is right to consider whose land I had transgressed morning after morning. And yet, I was startled into realizing at the river-level, that it was indeed time to leave that place.

There is a sorrow in that, a clinging to that which changed everything. There is a desire to make that life real and not this one. There is a happiness that I never knew I could know, but now I know it. So there is heartsong Beloved sings to me and it sounds like the silence of two, coming lip to lip, becoming one.