The Gentle Relentless Power

Sleeping tree limbs
A gray burial shroud
Scattered with jewels
To cover what will be
When the next year rolls around
Now we lay Uncovered

And Bare
Exposed.

 A mercifully free day popped up on our radar. No practice for Hobbes' stage debut in the Nutcracker Fantasy. No family commitments. No bike rides or writing or anything at all. Just freedom. So we slept late, feasted on cinnamon rolls (I, a gluten free, egg white only, flax seed milk cinnamon roll mug cake because I am extra like that, and had been presumably glutened the night previous.) and dressed for a day in the woods.

We made our way to Greeter Falls, a place I've been but barely remembered, until I reached the bottom of the spiraling staircase and saw the huge amphitheater carved out over the millennia by the steady, relentless, gentle-but-powerful flow of the water down, down, down, down the drop. And I'm reminded even now of what gentle relentless power can do, flowing over day by day, year by year. That kind of force unbridled can create something beautiful to behold.

I fell in the water while rockhopping, soaking my right foot. Then Paul accidentally loosed a branch he was holding as we skirted the top of the gorge, which flew back and hit me hard in the forehead. The boy serenaded us for seemingly hours with endless lectures about his imaginary friend Gagel the cat and his cohorts, as well as the cats from the Warriors series, with a smattering of dinosaurs. Someday, he is going to be a writer or a professor or some other profession where he can write and convey thoughts.

But then we took a short spur out to a place neither Paul or I had ever visited, Blue Hole, and as we descended into the little hollow there were laurels and rhododendrons, and it was like a whole other world set apart, and I was filled with happiness.

"The clearest way into the universe is through a forest wilderness." - John Muir