Another note at a time when the whole world is either making love, going to sleep or standing alone in a corner with invisible eyes, night of the city lights and night of the forests. I went into a forest today. It was once a park but it had fallen to disuse and nature has claimed it back. The victory of seeming disorder over order. There was a spring that began in that glade, in mud, moss and stone, water in another universal cycle. I jumped over fallen logs, pushing my face through cobwebs that became visible only after I stepped through them. A hushed darkness filled the day, the body returning to the womb, to union and dissolution.

I put my feet in the running water at the point where the spring tumbled over some rocks, shaped like an inverted jug with a broken spigot. Detritus, a broken plastic baseball bat, a can of shaving foam, some plastic wrappers. Somebody must have played by that spring sometime. Someone’s childhood ghosts lived there. A grass with a name I can’t now spell, was growing wild with small violet blooms. This is a garden grass, another sign of a time when that wood was tended to, kept civilized. This afternoon there were just the birds, now a pair of Carolina wrens, birds as big as my thumb and my fingers absorbing the coolness of the water.

I sit on a log, my legs swinging over the hollow in which the spring flows. Bands of sunlight reach the forest floor, a cathedral. I don’t pray, yet the disaffection of this life begins to recede like a wave. The forest becomes the silent presence I seek in another body of flesh and bone. I sit still; I fall into a meditation and become one with the world, blue cloud, clear water and dark green forest.

A car broke the silence after a long time, time which can only measured in how it affects the soul and not by any clockwork units. I stood up and went further, to another glade. This one is well kept with black pavement for a path. I stood at what we call the Red Bat Pond watching ripples. Some tree must have been dropping it’s kernels into the brown muddy water. On a rock on the other shore, was a bull frog in a patch of light, croaking. And from somewhere behind me in the woods came a response. Even if I did croak would listen and more so who would understand?

Night again, night of the street walkers, drug addicts, bums under interstate ramps, waiting for the day light to finally come