River Walk
Walked along the banks of a river yesterday, down into the canyon it’s been cutting for millions of years. The canyon was impressive, too. Big slabs of rock all around making their way down hill to the rushing water. And here and there I’d see cuts in the rock yet to fall where water fell from the tops of the mountain, rushing together into temporary streams, working with the river below to reshape the land.
Then later we went further upstream, higher into the mountains to a spot where the water drops into a roaring waterfall, falling down from mountains even further up. A cataract of nice size. Nothing to rival its bigger cousin along the Niagara, for instance, but still impressive in its own right. And I wondered how many more millions of years it would be before the falling water of that waterfall worked its way through the rock and cut down into the mountain to make its own canyon.
At the end of the day, we ate dinner, made music, and talked about the wonders we’d seen, before retiring. And meanwhile, the water and the river kept right on working into the night, smoothing rocks, moving dirt, deepening the canyon. The long slow dance of nature, and the universe, and time. And as I fell asleep, I could still hear the roar of the falling water and thought how little it cared that I stood for even an instance at its feet.
John W. Wilson is the author of The Long Goodbye: A Caregiver's Tale