I Had a Place

I had a place. A place of serenity and endless quietude draped with luxurious towering hemlock…

 …framed by poplar trees and guarded by a variety of oak and maple sentinels. The trail from my house led along the creek to a deepening and leafy divide no more than a dozen feet across and sloping gently downward. The soil beneath the forest cover went quickly from loam to red and gray clay, loose mortar between battalions of limestone soldiers. A slice of earth opened and veered downward to a bed across which an eternity of water had marched, making its way to the ocean. My small stream trickled its tireless way across bared boulders and countless pebbles glinting upward through the clarity of pure spring water. The place had an imposing feeling of security. It smelled of pine and wood and sweet loose soil. Wind wove its way through the treetops well above my head as the uppermost branches danced, aerial weirs ushering the whispering wayfarer onward.

I had found a place to recline, to muse and to linger. There was a saucer of verdant moss covering an ancient couch of rocks gently sculpted by time and elements into a cushioned depression in the bosom of Mother Earth. It was perfect for a retreat into the arms of sensory solitude, drenched in the ambient excesses of nature’s essence. She serenaded me with rhythms and rills evoking the stillness of moments suspended in time. Time lost its way, as I lay peacefully in the comfort offered effortlessly and endlessly renewed by the mossy fingers of the firm yet yielding contours. I floated effortlessly close to the ground and rested in a reverie serenaded silently by thoughts drifting aimlessly toward the heavens.

Many moments I spent in that tender embrace, accompanied only by my feline familiar. We would venture from that place toward the momentary end of the meandering waters that passed within reach of my open den. Before I arrived at the delta that encircled the base of the mountain erupting from the forest floor, I visited the walls of witnesses who had walked these trails before. I was never, for one moment, alone.