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.