The Water Way

Up into the canyon, the smell of rain still in the air,
I climb into a mist gray morning.
The stream is full now, gone so long from our lives
we thought we’d dreamed it
and water now overflows the path.
A log appears to balance on
across a flooded stretch and then
the path twists up along the hillside
through trees white with early blossoms.
I watch my step, the stones like ball-bearings
beneath my feet,
the sound of water growing louder as I climb.
I think of water which falls and flows
and doesn’t struggle,
doing what is demanded of it.
Effortlessly, it becomes a fog, a torrent,
a stagnant pool where insects of every wing and tentacle
live out their generations in a blink of time.
Sometimes it seeps to unseen depths
to merge and move in hidden ways toward the sea.
And so a great wheel has turned.
Mine is the animal way, to watch and learn.
To learn from water acceptance and grace,
the uselessness of struggle in the face of change,
the beauty of all stages,
the courage to be someone I hadn’t expected to be,
and to welcome this stranger into my heart.

by Barbara Wolf (1995)