Tuesday, July 01, 2008

Floating

I am learning something from this pond on the Two Hundred Acre Wood, this hidden place which is like any watery tributary with its currents and tides and seasons.

First there is springtime, when the water gurgles and roars after several months spent sleeping under a thick blanket of ice. Then there is summer with its waterlilies, pond weed and chanting frogs at sundown. Next comes autumn when the lily pads turn russet and the water flows gold and purple by turns in the late sunlight. Then comes another winter, slow deep breathing and gelid dreaming thoughts until the wheel turns again.

One would think that there is peace of mind in this third age, quietness, docility and resignation, but that is not so, at least for me. If anything, there is a greater passion for life, and there is much less patience with sameness, thoughtlessness and cruelty - there is emotional intensity and an obdurate resistance to sheepish conventions which is gentle or furious according to need and circumstances. There is wildness and a fierce embracing of reality.

I can no longer scale mountains and run blazing toward distant horizons at the speed of light, but I can be a pond, and a pond would be a good thing to be - indeed, I am already half way there. Like a pond, I have currents and tides and seasons, and I have a song to sing here - as soon as I figure out the words. In the meantime, I shall hum...

4 comments:

Sorrow said...

I think that it would be a beautiful song.
I find a great deal of solace at the edge of a pond.

kerrdelune said...

I really should retitle this blog and call it something along the lines of "Conversations With Myself".

One Woman's Journey - a journal being written from Woodhaven - her cottage in the woods. said...

Cate, Your words speak to me. They always speak to me.
Lately I am so restless. Is there something I am to do. I am trying to be still - when I can - and listen. I hear nothing.
Maybe I am to hear nothing but the silence.
The thoughts surface -the years where have they gone.
Not when I was experiencing them but now when I look back.
Who am I at this time and I know this is an insane remark.
Is it " a child of the universe"

Livia Indica said...

If you're a pond then I think I may be a creek, small and slow. A lovely post, especially for us watery people.