Today I was lazy like a cat. Stretched out in the sun on my
homemade dock, I drank the tea from Speedway and read. Then, I pulled myself up
for the walk back into the house and put on a couple bits of unmatched
swimsuit, picked up one of the inflated tubes and a rope, walked back to the
dock, tied the rope to the dock through the open space between two deck boards,
made a loop in the rope, slid the tube into the water and myself into the tube,
put my foot though that loop and . . . floated.
The normally still Flatrock was currenty and wanted to float
me into the now-blooming-in-pale-blue weeds along the river’s edge. I made
another loop at the very end of the rope, put my foot through that one and
spent an hour or more letting the current push me toward the dock. Then I’d
push off again with one foot and swoop outward, stretching the rope to its
fullest length. Then float back again to the shore. And so it went. Push swoop
float. Push swoop float. Push swoop float.
Roll over on my belly, push with my hand this time, then swoop float.
Push swoop float.
The turtles on the log across the river ignored me. At first
the leathery soft-shells slid into the water as they always do, rightfully
alarmed by the presence of human. But the quiet, push, swoop float was so
softly felt in their world that they eventually emerged and climbed right back
up on the log, rejoining their always braver hard-shelled cousins who weren’t
scared into taking a dive just because a human showed up in the neighborhood.
A fish jumped out of the water behind me once. A little one
nibbled on my leg where it lay just below the water surface once.
I cried a minute or two from the beauty of it. For quite a
while I didn’t think about people, or about me, or
about how I was doing nothing but what I was doing, which was nothing. I knew
the beauty of those moments while I was living them.
Namaste river.
You have god in you.
