My husband and I live near a river valley, and no matter what time of day I walk the view, it's morning. Because there are miracles happening, things seen fresh.
The river itself is opaque jade, slow liquid; up close it's a murky green tea, carrying the dregs of prairie silt and always flowing, yet still
. Feast on silence, I write on the occasional shelf of sand.
Today Josh and I heard the soft
skraw of something in the red-barked bush. Josh joked about a wheeze,
a weasel!, and went off to track it, in his keen gentle way. I stayed down by the water's edge, with the hush and the flow, and eventually we both came round to spotting three wrens. Inhabiting the radius of a birch among the dogwoods, minute throats tuned not to song but to -- can we call it scratch? A delicate thrum and rattle, better than any needle on vinyl, and millions of willow-leaves ahead of machine.
So too the gulls. City-work crunches the timeless river with bridge construction, cranes and dozers letting off noise like smoke, but there are seagulls silently riding the breeze. All that unharvested light and breath to soar! Wheeling the air since they first feathered from God's hands, long before someone dreamed the wheel and axle, the engine, the fuel to feed
forward! and
faster!Always flowing, yet still. In marriage, I feel this. Like any leap of faith, it's rewarded with both vertigo and clarity, with a sense of motion and a sense of
this one moment. Where does the energy come from? Not my chug of consumption, that's for sure. I want to say it's more like catching a draft of light, a push of breath not my own.
Trusting the wind and the water's current and that peculiar scratch in the throat...
