Run, Run, The River Runs

I had spent an hour or so wandering in the summer woodland with no particular agenda in mind, weaving between the trees, absorbed in the rich tapestry of birdsong, and the wash of wind in the canopy overhead. The air was warm, and I kept remembering the promise to ourselves that we would take the time to be together and make love. Pushing aside some low branches revealed a bright stream that somehow in all the internal chatter, I had not recognised. Light dazzled here and there where the surface broke into riffs and ripples, several boulders dotted the stream course their dark wet flanks streaked with mosses.

Heading upstream I followed as closely as I could the bank, and when I came to a bend in the stream where shingle had been thrown up by winter surges to create a small beach, I slipped the camera bag from my shoulder, took off my shoes and sat resting my feet in the gently lapping water. A moment later I had laid back into the grasses and was soon at the tipping point between wakefulness and sleep. Rocking gently between the two.

The warmth of the sun, the sound of the river running, the wind rustling leaves all the sounds blended into one harmonious flow. The richness of it all seeped deeper into my body, searching out the spaces between sinew and bone, inflating any available space, insinuating itself into the blood itself, and so to heart and brain. Soon I was saturated with landscape, memory of its contours still lingering in my limbs, colours firing tracers of light behind closed eyelids, the scent of wetness and heat filling my nostrils. The deeper I slipped into this landscape of sensuous memory and bodily sensation the more aroused I became with my senses filled to the point of tautness; the river’s voices, insects buzzing in the air, and the deep slow buckling and heaving of the earth itself. As the planet on whose very skin I roam orbited about the sun, I sank deeper and deeper into the scent of the earth, realised more wholly its embrace that bound me to it, and that all things remain forever in motion.