RIP Story: October 7th, 2024

Forest walks were the best time to feel the flow of Nature. He could feel the flow when he was next to moving water. The small streams that fed the rivers were unlike anything he could see back home. The well worn trail carried people, and critters, on their forest walks. He found he wanted to stop every time they were near the rain-fed stream. The rains that made getting to this place unpleasant now provided healing he never expected to find. The ripples of water as they flowed over smoothed rocks added their notes to the music of the forest. He felt the power of this stream, which he could easily stand in, yet this stream had enough energy to make him feel like the rest of his life was being carried away through the micro rapids toward the big river.

Breaths felt deeper, calm felt stronger.

His family was well up the trail. They were probably waiting for him, but they couldn’t get off the trail without walking back, and he had the keys, so they weren’t going anywhere. He closed his eyes and listened to the water a few seconds longer before he kept moving along the trail. Farther up the trail, he came to a collection pool. Refreshed by the rains, he found himself alone, standing beside a tree that marked the pool’s exit point that fed the stream they’d been hiking alongside. The trail ran along the left bank of the pool, and nature owned the right bank. On the other side was a large crop of rocks. They must have been fifty feet high. The pool was calm and looked so clean. “Where is a rock?” he said.

His search hit the jackpot with a collection of small pond rocks asking to be thrown into and skipped across the pool. The last person he saw was his wife, who waved as they took the trail around the far side of the tall rocks. When he ran out of stones, he found some more. He counted the highest number of skips he got with one rock. “It was 8,” he would later tell his wife. In the car ride home, everyone talked about the trail's end during the car ride back. The waterfall sounded beautiful. The vibe sounded chill, and they agreed the group photo they took with the waterfall background would look great framed and hung on that blank spot in the kitchen.

He heard someone say they were sad he didn’t make it to the end to see what they saw, “it was so beautiful, you would have loved it.”

“That’s okay. I found my destination for the day. I’m glad you found a happy place, too.”

He spent the rest of the drive with songs of his youth playing in his head while his heart hung on to the stream’s energy for as long as it could remember.

Thanks for reading, see you tomorrow.

EPILOGUE: This is about a stream in Sedona. There is something special about the feel of a forest stream. It’s hopeful and healing and is something that I would love to be around on a day-to-day basis. That isn’t where life has me at the moment, but that doesn’t stop me from wroting a story about it.