The Whispering of the River Spirit

Such a blessing! To wake up and to feel the spacious springtime around the house. Dwelling under the Gardian Oaktree literally means to Be. Here you can feel in every fiber of your body that Here is where we are meant to Arrive, not to settle down. That would be in vain, as we will have to Leave this stay in life. Well, let me not anticipate, but limit my feeling of Arrival in the here and now.

Thanks to Barry Morvinson, who wrote a very understanding comment on my yesterdays journal. I agree fundamentally with his remark: ‘“The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there.” So in a way our past is uncertain as well. So all we have is the here and now. The future is yet to be.’ Yes indeed and isn’t that marvellous? Liberating! And encouraging to relive, reenact the essential happenings from our past in a redeeming and deepening way.

That is a great opportunity we have as we grow: not rushing on in the mighty world, but slowing down in a creative way and retrieve what we overlooked in the past, “over”-lived, as we robbed ourselves from the opportunity to sort things out, to give it a more balanced place. Not in a kind of sentimental “à la recherche du temps perdu.”: Proustian searching for lost time. Nor in a resentful grudging effort to settle that old history in some definite version.

What I mean here is that we should seize any opportunity in the here and now to enjoy our experiences in sincere gratitude and live that feeling fully. To find anew the feeling pace or emotional rhythm that is immanent in that experience. So that it can be remembered as forever new, deep and fruitful (Rilke: “neu, tief und fruchtbar”). In other words: mindful living and reliving from the here & now.

In that sense of gratefully feeling arrived, liberated and in touch again with our Oaktree, The Little Friedensthal Brook, I saw amazing images of the Brook Fairies, whispering their giggling stories about rubies, emeralds, topaz, aquamarine and amethyst fish. Thanks to Sydney who saw this secret treasury first in my Wintertale Photo. And then down at the Weser riverside I sat on the big rock stone, where the cormorants sit and watch. The stone has fallen dry as the water level is low.

Breathing and relaxing I watched the fast fleeting current. And there from under the lightening whirling of the stream the River Spirit was looming and whispered gurgling the rhythm of a new song:

on the fisher friends stone here I
sit loosing the maddening world
into your shiny turning stream,
o spirit, let me know the depth
of your unending calmness, you
soft streaming power, gobbling
and playing to leave me now
this fisher friends rock to rest.