Just down-slope from a well-used trail near the creek there is a pool thickly covered in duckweed at the foot of an old tree trunk which has splintered at its waist and been wrenched over into a stoop. Think of this as a signpost. It will invariably be quiet there with a lonely and forgotten feel but maybe a chipmunk watching from atop those ruins will give away the true nature of the place and then the evening flame of a Northern Flicker startled out of the brush will confirm that you are in the right place. Though it avoids you and makes itself silent, there is so much life in this small margin between trail and creek. Life both like your own and not, life hidden within other, larger life or its remains, concentrically bound to each other but still intrinsically free and enduringly fugitive.
And, in the rich, retreating light just beyond that point, you will find the bone-white trunk of a fallen pine which juts out over the water at the creek's bend while, above it, an unusual pattern of carved clouds jags into the blue sky. All around you will be wild Rose and Swamp Onion in the hip-deep grass, wavering in and out of the shadows cast by that sun-bleached wood. There with you too, some Bigleaf Avens, Nude Buckwheat, a few noiseless birds passing too quickly and near the edge of vision to name, and many semi-hidden sinkholes giving way to the wet sand and large enough that you could curl yourself up into them-- a secret within a secret.
If you end up there, you will feel it. How soft all the petals are, how coarse the blades of grass, how you want to be hidden there too, and how it all springs up where many others have fallen beside that creek which itself passes by so quietly that one has to take it on faith that it's still there, moving behind you with its own unnameably gentle insistence.
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