It’s been a while since my last post. The wild ebb and flow of life has kept me otherwise occupied, but today, there’s a melancholy yearning in my heart that brings me back.

It’s late afternoon.  I have an hour or so before I have to go back to work for a Board meeting.  I drove to Blue Star for a latte and then drove down to the river,  picked my way out to a little spit of land where the water is rushing by shallow, cold, rocky. Everyone seems to have had the same idea today.   Scattered  around the river are clusters of people, a man with his toddler son, an old woman with her dog, people in singles, pairs, small groups basking in the river’s presence.

The river is a balm.  Throughout the day, I’ve felt a small dense pressure in my heart.  It is free from story or cause.  Free from any particular worry.  Rather it feels like a conduit to a deeper layer of my humanity, a sort of heartache of living, of aliveness.

No matter how deeply I fall into awakened consciousness, this heartache is always there.  It’s like this river rushing, thinning, opening, always moving from source to sea to rain and snow and back again, passing through stalk and leaf and fruit.  Today it blossoms here inside me, bursting forth with a persistence that cannot be ignored.

Nothing can stop its course.  Nothing  plug its source.  The hole from which it springs is eternal, human, precious.  I’m grateful for its waters that bathe me in such tenderness and tenderize me with with its relentlessness. Long may it ramble.