The Living Place

The place where I usually go is underwater.

Ironic.

The place I go to escape the tiresome river of my daily custom has itself been hidden by the river. My thoughts are restless and now homeless. Places, it sometimes seems, though they are everywhere, are at times nowhere to be found. But when they are, they usually tend to find you first. And so it happens that a place shows itself to me on a rock at the very end of a long jetty. It stretches out and then veers suddenly left beyond an outcropping of trees and vegetation giving a sense of remoteness and removal.

The river moves differently here. It is more rushed and unpredictable with a vitality that is invigorating. At any particular moment there are a dozen or so tiny vortexes gliding over what I suppose to be an irregular terrain of large rocks beneath the surface. These tiny lifeforms are born, pushed briefly by the current and then dissolve back into the water. It never fails that if you sit and watch long enough, wherever you are will begin to take on a life of its own and show you things you would never see otherwise.

I imagine for a moment that I am one of those little swirling creatures, ushered swiftly along by time and chance over unyielding space. Formed for an instant and suddenly the rocks slip into depth and I am gone. Before long I am hypnotized by the parade of life and death happening in front of me. I want to call out, “Be still. You're moving too fast.” But before the thought is complete, another generation is gone, and I am left helpless to do anything but watch. And then this question begins to haunt me. When will my own feet fail to meet the rocks beneath me? I am formed. I move or am moved, rather, and then released into something so vast and mysterious that I simply dissolve away. The rocks fall away. Eventually, the rocks will always fall away. The depth is coming for me.

For you.

Everyone.

I’ve never felt this eternal question so plainly until now. The answer, in turn, is just as plain.

Be still.

A breeze blows. The water, the clouds, my hair and the leaf floating in front of me all move in the same motion, toward the same eternity.

God is in the air.

And the water.

Something about the water makes the sky feel so much gentler and closer, as if one were created for the other. The earth does not understand the sky. There is a stark contrast created when trees meet the horizon, and the earth looks like nothing but a pile of ashes beneath a burning sun. But there is something in the relationship between the water and the sky that is different. When the one touches the other they become suddenly enormous. Indistinguishable. Even now as I write these words, I see a bird fly down and trace the frail distinction, ready in a single motion to merge the two worlds. The depth of the water becomes suddenly infinite as space itself.

That, I think, is the true answer. There is more than just the rocks and the water that rushes me above them. More than the depth below that swallows our bodies up. There is that enormity that begins where the rushing ends. It is here where the eternal meets the ephemeral, and I become more than swirling water and burned earth.