After the flood...Inner Journeying, Outer Explorations, Day 3

I walked up the Desire Path (as Robert Macfarlane calls these casual foot-maintained paths created by humans and other animals in his book, The Old Ways; A Journey on Foot) to visit the Smallwood after the storm.  All looks well, if sodden.  The wet-weather rivulet sparkles and rushes down our abandoned alley, cutting a new channel as it reaches the open area in imitation of a larger river in flood.

...happily this time it stayed peacably on the east side rather than diverting to our basement; the first year I lived here the sound of rushing water was a new Niagara.  

I love the way the newborn river catches silver light in its tiny turbulence, winking bright between the overhanging leaves.  Belle helps me to inspect the rate of flow...

When I was little, I used to float leaf boats down occasional creeks like this...and a quick check with my Inner Journey guide answered "so what's stopping you, silly?"  Of course I had to try it again. 

I'd forgotten the leaf must be DRY, otherwise it immediately sinks; I'd lost the wisdom of childhood.  Finding a dry leaf in all that rain was a challenge...but we did it, Belle and I...

And then of course had to sketch it in a corner of my journal...

The new garage-sale frog was FULL of water from the downpour...I guess it really WAS a "frog-strangler" as the old farmers around here used to say!

Walking barefoot in the wet is one of life's simple pleasures...

The volunteer mulberry just beyond the bird feeders glistened with rain from crown to root...it looked as though it had been painted with transparent liquid silver.

It reminded me of a lyrical passage from Kevin Hearne's Iron Druid Chronicles: "...we are loved, like all living things that Gaia sustains.  There is poetry in the canopies of forests and in the gentle roll of hills, a song in the wind and a benediction in the kiss of the sun.  There are stories in the chuckle of waters in creeks, and epics told in the tides of oceans.  There are trees...that seem sometimes like they have grown all their lives just to feel the touch of my hand upon their trunks, they are so welcoming to me...." 

And so this mulberry has always been.  I greet it daily, give it my thanks, eat of its fruit and feed it with leaves from my herbal teas...

...each moment of gratitude is a moment of Grace.   

Once more from Kevin Hearne..."you'll feel it in your toes as you walk upon the earth."  And again...
"Walk as though you are kissing the Earth with your feet," said Thich Nhat Hanh.  And so I did, mindfully, full of gratitude and paying attention to each step, ...and if I did not, my knee reminded me! 

Its roots were exposed by the hard rain...who knew they were so multicolored!

Wild grapes I didn't know lived in the Smallwood...

a last flower on the garlic mustard...

The shed tucked away safely in the lush green world...

And back inside before the next rain, my need for fire found expression with a beeswax candle magnified with a quartz crystal...

Moments of Grace indeed.