A Stream's Distance

A stream's distance: 

there is much to love about my town, it's where I grew up and the principles upon which it was founded have helped shape my sense of care and decency. It's a planned community designed and founded in the 1960's and at it's core it was created with high ideals of what a city should be. Mostly, with growing pains along the way, it has succeeded.  But for me, my greatest love is the insistence of trees, streams and ponds being left to retain a bit of wildness, that my suburban community still feels nature based even after decades of development. 

it's a small miracle of city planning. 

perhaps what I most love is that I'm just a stream's distance from any other point within the world - a realization that occurred to me as a child roaming the local woods and following my neighborhood streams to where they fed into larger waters. The small creek that's behind my house can be traced to larger streams that eventually become the Middle Patuxent river and leading into the major Patuxent river and then the Chesapeake Bay. I used to dream that I could one day follow my small creek all the way to the Atlantic ocean and beyond, reaching distance shores and roaming even further. 

just a small stream,

and I felt connected to the world. 

this was an early spiritual epiphany for me, discovering that something I loved could lead to a greater connection, that I was but a stream's distance from anywhere else, with nothing being truly outside the grasp of my imagination. I've stayed in my hometown, in fact I live in my childhood home that's been left to me with my father's passing. I'm connected to him as well here, his own love of the land and community, settling here in the earliest days of its founding, believing that it was the safest and most fulfilling place for his family to thrive. 

I think of all this as I walk so early in the morning, solitary, surrounded by trees and stir of animals nearby, the motion of water playing softly to my ears. What I hear is the voice of my community, it's ideals and values, and listening deeply, a connection whispers to me now, an entire landscape, rivers, bays and oceans call to me right here, my father too reassures me that he's always near. 

 and that I'm just a stream's distance from any other point within the world. 

connected.

~

Peace, Eric