Thoughts Landing in Soft Water

As Tine prepared to fall asleep Friday night, her thoughts fell back to the waterfall she'd passed on Diamond Glen, on her way to Will Warren's Den with Rubob.



Tine had watched the water in the millpond surge over the ruins of the dam -- water that once powered saw and grist mills.

"When I think back on my walk today," Tine reflected, "so many thoughts seem to tumble over the dam at once. It's often like that on walks. Everything comes bubbling up to the surface of the pond and rushes over the dam, into the stream of thoughts that fills our days."



She thought back to something she'd read in a book she'd bought on her trip to the Sound this past week, "Random Recollections: Anecdotal Tales of a Bygone Guilford." The author, Stan Barnes, wrote that as a boy he'd won a contest for a cartoon showing a man going over Niagara Falls. His winning caption was, "It was soft water where he landed."

In a walk -- and in reflections on a walk -- everything falling over the dam finds soft water in which to land. It's all taken up in a free flow of ideas and received in the soft water of contemplation.