Palouse

The river is high and muddy with spring melt. Flattened grasses along the bank point downstream, evidence of last month’s deeper flow. I am in a hidden meadow on the inside curve of a sharp bend. At flood’s peak a month or so ago, water snuck across the bend in a shortcut, leaving channels two to three feet deep, four to five feet across. I’m walking in one of these now, moving to and fro along the soft earth, imagining the spin and splash of water, up one side then the other, finally arriving at a wide, rounded funnel-like depression. I sense the whirlpool of water churning through and begin to spin inward until I come to rest at the bottom. There I stand quietly listening to my sense instrument.

I love this stretch of river, just downslope and a bit east of Paul's house. For a dozen years this has been my second home, a place to create, to heal, to discover. And right here, right now at the center of this vortex in the meadow I feel all the revolutions of my bodysoul, my deep history unfolded in this valley, spinning about my being like a slow moving tornado of images, sensations, insights and intuitions. My arms are stretched out reaching into the bright weather of these many years, gathering a force of experience held in the ponderosa pine and long grass and tangled brush and river island and circling hawk and playful otter and bounding deer and hot dusty road and gentle flowing river and spring wildflowers and ten thousand deep breaths. My heart opens as a resonant tone calling forth my evolution, gathering a spectrum of states in a compressed acceleration. The vortex narrows rapidly spinning wildly about and my cells vibrate spontaneously in a coherent flow of knowing and remembering and gathering all the grace and gravity and goodness I have tasted in this beautiful, beautiful valley. I am weightless, a stillpoint of perfect energy floating above the ground, filling the bowl of this rich curving earth like the late afternoon sun cupped in my hands. A deep, radiant swell of gratitude and acceptance moves through my body, a great heaving integration of Here-Am-I into Who-Might-We-Be, now home again and again, made whole once again.

Thomas