Namaste, River.

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.