Raining Down the Backyard Watercourse

What a thing it is to sit absolutely alone . . . cherished by this wonderful, unintelligible, perfectly innocent speech, the most comforting speech in the world, the talk that rain makes by itself all over the ridges, and the talk of the watercourses everywhere in the hollows!
--Thomas Merton, from When the Trees Say Nothing

The life-giving rain has fallen for much of the past two days. So, my little backyard creek--dry much of the year, slow-moving except for days of hard rain--swells for a short while. I watch the relatively high water carrying soil downstream, to be dumped in the Loosahatchie River, then on to the Mississippi River, and on to the Gulf of Mexico, where ocean currents, those rivers in the sea, move all the waters of the world.

I want to know the watershed I live in, so I think about where the water may be going as I watch it flow, listening to the gurgling of its swift passage over the stream bed--the "talk of the watercourses," as Merton names it. The rain speaks steadily while water accumulates here, and when the rain slows, the immemorial tones and rhythms in the music of the watercourse demand more of the ear's attention.

The creek flows through my suburban neighborhood, but it was here first. It's drained this land for hundreds of years, at least. I get a sense of being in a less artificial place every time I walk down to it, and notice how integral to the landscape it is.

The soil, over many years, has been displaced from the much of the stream-side roots of the tree in the foreground. The one behind it is leaning toward the stream, having lost too much of its earthy foundation. Trees like this eventually fall across the streams when their roots can no longer hold them. Everything here, as in all places, changes slowly by our human sense of time, but change is continual. Water changes the land when it falls in the form of rain or passes in the form of a stream, or the shore of a lake, or the edge of a continent.

Here's another border, closer to the water flow than the bank where trees stand. The current in the water has tossed the gravel around for a very long time. So the individual rocks become smooth-surfaced, though their shapes and colors vary. The speech of rain and watercourse shapes the earth's rocky crust. Eventually, the rocks here will be sand below, and new rocks will lie on top of those grains of sand.

The occupation of watching these forces captivates me.

Grey Winter Day

Sunless winter days are seldom thought of as beautiful. They more typically feel dreary, and evoke a longing for spring, or at least a blue sky and sunshine. Yet the grey days have their own aesthetic distinctions. Trees laid bare offer their shapes and forms without foliage, and what you see there depends on the quality of attention you bring to the moment--your ability to see the thingness of what you gaze on.

The oak above spreads widely, its crown uncommonly broad. Its branches are loaded with galls, ball-like formations common to oaks. The limbs are large and strong. Below, a row of graceful cypress trees stands by a pond, their younger and more vertical crowns offering another natural architecture to the observer.

Some wintertime trees make you wonder where the shapes came from. Those in the image below look windswept, and one can almost imagine the two of them being swept in different directions. Still, the trunks and branches bend in a way that to me feels and appears agile, harmonious. They could be dancers, holding their arrays of fanlike twigs at the end of their limbs. But in fact they are trees, and I appreciate them most for their tree-natures.

A few clumps of broomsedge, which move from green in summer to gold and orange in fall and winter, stand in the foreground of the photo below. They gain a kind of prominence against the less-colorful though serene background. (They look good against a blue sky, too, especially when whole fields of them are on display.) But they only get their standout color in contrast to what's around them when most of the green things are dormant.

When I left the house, moving out into the day at first seemed chilly and damp, cheerless and somber. After I'd been walking for a while, I found myself more and more interested in what was there, and discovered I'd become more present, more part of the place I moved through. The walking warmed me, as it always does. Looking at what was actually there, wanting to see the place as it distinctively was at that moment, focused my seeing, my attention, on what was in fact there, rather than on some "ideal" day I might have wished for. I often sense that wishing for ideal forms (sorry, Plato) is not only futile, but a failure to draw the blessedness from an already-offered abundance.

It was a good day, and a good walk.

Fast-Moving Clouds

I watch the sky's appearance change from moment to moment. It's late January, southeastern United States, the kind of windy day that keeps gathering clouds in continuous motion. It's not one of those times when you can study clouds long enough to imagine they look like something that matches something else, where one billowy cumulus looks like a reclining woman, propped on an elbow, and another looks like a unicorn.

These clouds are dark and thick, with a lot of water in them. They almost cover the sun, yet the sun is insistent, illuminating a spot behind the flow of vapor in the stream of clouds.

So the sky isn't all black. The sun penetrates, and colors different shades where the cloud thicker or thinner, adding texture along with changing hues and brightness.

A small patch of blue shines briefly in the photo above, allowing the light to offer a barely visible but discernible rainbow in the top of the image.

In the picture above, even more than the others, the clouds appear as a tunnel. All clouds like these, dense, and near-bursting with the rain they're about to release, have moments of vivid three-dimensionality.

You can imagine a journey through the nebulous passage leading to a brilliant light at the other end, where the cold sky shines blue in thinning air.