Where Water Takes Me.

It just so happens that when the sun shines the roads dry. And finally today the rains have stopped. While I speak literally, I wonder if it is more of a metaphor. The clouds have parted. And while the heavens have opened up and dropped all they have on us, leaving some of us wading, some of us washed away and some of us homeless, there are the few left untouched on high ground. Moral, or physical. I have rarely been on either, but I am neither floating away nor running for the hills. Slowly making my way to the sea.

Although I have always done this on my own, I have never been alone. No one ever really is. I fill my life with love in many forms and friends from all over. I wonder if there will ever be a river that leads me any where but where I have always been going. This is a river that flows as a stream past a cabin in the woods of my birth. It is the canyons of red stone where this river tumbled, carving away centuries. It is in the ponds I swam in as a child, stranded on a rock stalked by a snapping turtle. It is in the puddles I splashed in with my pink rubber boots and it is in the rain that fell so gently over me in last night's walk with my new best friend (my chocolate ice cream cone). How could that rain, so gentle and romantic rip away mountainsides, came crashing down on homes and wash away roads. It is the water in my life that guides me. When I think about the paths that I have chosen and the choices that I make, I imagine that I blaze these trails on my own. I walk these paths alone. And that I have some control over this river I am riding. Yet today, I wonder why I have taken each of these turns and why I continue to come back to some of the same streams and shores again and again.

Is it the sound the water make splashing over the rock, the way my toes are licked by the icy cold water, the silence in the dark pools under the trees where the stream bends. Or is it the sand that warms under the sun. Where ever there is water weaving and winding between soft shores, I feel at home. I was born next to a stream nearly 8 inches wide. I bathed in a river across the road, swam in ponds and looked out over a glimmering lake from the top of a hill for years. I lived along side the ocean and then by the bay. Then I ran from the mouth of the Yangtze river to follow a path that even I couldn't see. To where I now sit above a gorge that carries the rains from mountaintops to the valley below and then who knows where beyond that. It is there, in the unseen distance, around that next bend that my path lies... even if it keeps brining me back to the same places, the same places that I keep leaving.