Arriving to the dinner destination earlier than our time of reservation, I drove past the restaurant and turned off the main road as the car behind me impatiently passed. Down a road hidden from the main drag by an outcropping of rocks and a thickly-grown forest of pine, I found a little space for the car. After parking there, I crossed over to the stream you see in the photos. I stepped carefully down a small but steep bank where the top points of daylilies were just jutting through a blanket of brown leaves. Ahead of me, the water moved, and I heard a few tiny waterfalls lend their music to the quiet afternoon.
It was still light out, which was still somewhat of a new sensation at that hour, and I paused beside this stream. For all my superficial trappings, and for all my perceived glamour, I am most at home and at ease in a scene like this, when I am completely alone in some natural space. It brings me back to boyhood, when I would traipse through the forests near our house for hours, back when a kid could do that and no one would worry whether he was still alive.
On this day, I stood still , watching and listening to the water rushing by me. It was a moment of reverence and honor. Any wooded patch cut through by a stream often carries a sense of hushed solemnity to it. It was also, as brief and fleeting as it may have been, a moment of meditation, and I realized it then and there. Taking in a deep breath and letting it slowly out, I felt a gratitude for being in such a space. Within that singular moment, everything was as it should be, and I understood that I would take that feeling with me – that it would be a gift of the forest, in the way the forest has always given me peace.
