When our worlds get too small there’s a bigger one we can turn to.

I learned last night from a guest, a young mom with her toddler and husband, staying at our river cabin, that the Medina river’s flow in front of our cabin has stopped. I think the best thing about the cabin is the river that flows just below it. As  I apologized, I was interrupted. The young mom told me they were enjoying their visit, especially one evening when they had fed some deer by hand below the deck of the cabin. 

I hung up the phone and quickly wrote all our upcoming Airbnb guests to let them know the river’s flow had stopped. I thought they should know the water there isn’t safe to enter. Flow means health. Stagnant water can mean danger. 

Years ago, my brother Al and I spent a few mornings enjoying his new JetSki‘s on the lake,  back when there was a lake. 

We flew across the mirror of water at 50 miles an hour, and I thrilled at the wind, thrilled at the sun, thrilled at the water spraying beside me, thrilled at the velocity. 

Sometimes we drove the jet ski’s at much slower speeds to where the river gently emptied into the lake. I maneuvered among boulders, watching for white water, directing the jet ski away to where the water was green and safe for me to move forward. Up we crept till the winding river’s current was too shallow to continue. 

The river was nature’s florid signature in colorful ink  on a contract I had with life and security. It was my heart’s consolation that there was more to the world than my short arms and sights could take hold of. What a relief to know my small world and its wobbling’s were safely contained within something bigger, where rivers flow and cypress trees tower.

In my mind’s eye I I see the river’s current come and go past the rocks on which I sit near my cabin. What I have is the moment. My hot feet refreshed from two hours or so of freshening up the cabin, hauling trash and weed eating the yard. I can neither keep that freshness nor give it away. 

I watch the water come and go. In my mind, it flows and keeps my hope and heart remembering this is how it goes: the water flows toward me, past me, and out beyond me, or my reach. 

It is a part of me, here now, then gone like a breath, a mysterious gift, like my brother, the sun, the trees and rocks. I don’t deserve or not deserve them. I remember them and their gifts flow within and through me to the next moment. 

This morning I read on my phone messages notes from each of the guests I wrote to last night. They thanked me for the information I sent them. Some may cancel their stay at the cabin. Others will come anyway, and take in the trees and stillness, the deer who come on their daily treks, early mornings and late in the dusk. They come to drink in, like the deer, the quiet and calm that reminds them, too, that there’s more out there, bigger and quieter than the wobbling’s of our work-world or our worries. More, much more.