naturing

Spent Sunday's daylight at a waterfall in Woodbridge. A. brought curry he'd cooked, sliced pineapple, and cold clementines. I brought leftover rice recently reheated in the microwave. The short drive was spent becoming acquainted with silence, and living through the open windows and open sunroof. Entering the narrower roads, the fluffy green of spring, so light and nonchalant as the car wheels crunched along, made silence easy. I'd forgotten how green it gets. I'd forgotten the way you forget photographs from last year's trip across the world even though you spent weeks after that trip flipping through the same pictures over and over. Upon arrival, we surveyed the contents of his trunk: two chairs, a cot, a sleeping bag, and a wheelchair. "What do you think we need?" "One chair and a sleeping bag," I decided, for once making a decision.

It's a short walk and a slight descent onto the rocks, where the sleeping bag was spread, the chair placed still folded on another. We ate first, and bites through my fourth or fifth clementine I realized that I'd have to pee at some point in the day (twice, it turned out). He threw the peels into the water. It was still five or six hours until daylight would slip. The first hour was spent meeting feet with water. We saw a couple of frogs, and I looked down the creek for minutes. I cross-legged onto the chair with my book, which I finished late that afternoon; he laid on the rock spread with sleeping bag and hours passed. Somewhere in those hours I slept deliciously, sitting and thinking that it must be raining because the water was streaming by in steady slushes and waking up intermittently to the pleasant surprise of being dry, warm and sunned and closing eyes again. We woke to eat again. I walked along the banks, up on the slopes and down by where water made dirt mud, and spent a full two minutes blowing the fluff off a lone dandelion. I made it back to the parking lot and tried writing into a rock with another stone. When I made it back to our rocks he'd moved, and I took his spot atop the sleeping bag. I was closer to the water here, and it sounded different, just a few feet from where I'd been there before. The police woke me, to ask what we were doing; apparently it is unusual to find people sitting at the base of a waterfall and sleeping on a rock up the bank.

When they left, we began staring at each other. He had suggested this as an activity months before, and it'd recently come up in conversation with a stranger newly met, and I thought of it again, as something I'd now be ready to try. I only laughed for the first couple seconds. From watching him I understood we were allowed to move, so long as we kept eye contact; and the mosquitoes kept us swatting about and the rocks' edges kept us shifting legs and feet. I didn't imagine the activity as meditative; I imagined it as an interaction between people. So for a long time I was frustrated; I felt a barrier more than an entrance; I don't know any better what he was thinking or how he was feeling. I've often thought that not seeing is a result of not trying hard enough to look and see. But this made me feel that you can look and look so long and hard, and still not see. I only felt more strongly how much I didn't know, and once the frustration reached its peak, I slipped into a groove where I felt I could do this for a long, long time. It was then that I felt something give; the barrier remained the same, but I felt patience come. And I felt that the best I could do is be patient, to keep looking without expectation or return, and so a very long time did pass.

The day was slow and languid; when I look back I envision a movie montage with scenes moving from one position to the next, but the experience of it wasn't a series of clips. It was a natural flow of feeling a sense and letting it take its course. It's a little cove of elements, not a postcard or even a picture, but better; a space to fill and then leave, that gives without effort on anyone's part. Maybe it defies laws of physics or whatever, because I really don't think the reaction is equal in force, though its direction may be opposite; it is an insensibly generous thing when you are so still and things envelop you so hard.