Relax and take a deep breath while you begin to imagine yourself floating down a lazy stream in an old inner tube. It is an overly warm summer day in late July or August and the stream is cool but not terribly cold. Your body, lying in the water through the inside opening of the black tube, has long since become oblivious to the temperature difference of air and water. The tube feels warm to the touch when your hand and arm brush across it as you extend out to trail your fingers in the water surrounding your little cocoon. Your eyes are closed and your head is settled back against the warm rubber tube, and you are comfortable and at peace for the first time in long time.
The sounds surrounding the stream begin to enter your subconscious as you let your mind drift along with the gently bobbing inner tube. The water occasionally making slight gurgling and splashing sounds against your raft and you can hear it slurping against the banks of earth as you slowly float on by. Lapping lazily on the shore of rock, mud and wayward grasses. A larger splash can be heard behind you and even though you don’t see what animal makes the sound, it is more comforting than frightening. Nothing more than a fish or some other amphibian splashing through the surface of their watery world. As your thoughts drift along in a hazy lull, it occurs to you that perhaps it was a warm-blooded creature such as an otter or muskrat, or perhaps a beaver, which is now slinking silently through the lazy waters. The sun overhead occasionally reflecting off its waterproof fur coat and leaving it to glint under the surface of the water as it searches for a mid-day meal.
The sound escapes your mind as your ears pick up other sounds on your slow escape from reality. A blue jay caws as you pass by the tree it has harbored itself in. You know it watches you wearily though it probably isn’t all that overly concerned of your presence. Other birds can be heard flitting from tree to tree and occasionally they call out to a mate that is never far away. Scuttling sounds can be heard just over the sides of the stream bank, deep in the shade of the overhanging tree limbs and bushes. You imagine a gray or perhaps a red squirrel, chewing on a delicious tidbit of food it has just foraged from the damp forest floor. The woodland creature sits down on its hunches and chews on its morsel, turning it slowly around in its forefeet, swallowing some of it before it decides to stuff the remainder into its cheek to take back to its nest. It does a quick survey of its surroundings before it quietly scampers off to find more food to store away for the coming winter months.
The warmth of the sun allows you to enjoy the cooling summer breeze, leaving you with the sensation that your skin is being gently caressed. A slight smell of warm rubber has long since mixed with the over abundant fragrance of the water and earth around you. Your mind and body are left in peace to drift along unhindered on the lazy water filled pathway. Content to listen to the sounds of nature and letting them cloak and protect you in a total sense of well being.
You are certain that you are more asleep than awake during this time, probably the reason it takes longer than usual to understand that the sounds around you are changing. There is an urgency beginning to creep into the will of the water as it carries you along in your subconscious slumber. Your eyes open lazily and it is hard to focus on your surroundings as the blood red of your closed eyelids are replaced with the brilliance of the sun. The first indication that you may need to survey your surroundings in more detail is an extra buoyant feeling of the inner tube, a slight wobble, then an extra bounce or two across a wave that wasn’t there a moment ago. Then you hear it, faintly at first, then more clearly as you seem to be picking up speed on your watery highway.
A slight panic begins to arise without warning. The inner tube, for in all its casualness in protecting you within its serene cocoon moments ago, seems to be gleefully hindering your efforts to pull yourself up and out of its safety to allow you to see ahead of you. Finally, after a bit of a struggle between the weight of your own body and the inner tube, you are able to free yourself enough to see. You realize the gravity of the predicament you have put yourself in by letting the world slowly move you through it without care or consideration on your part. The stream is quickly closing the gap between you and the waterfall of life. A full panic is beginning to settle in and you struggle with your mind to keep your wits and common sense about you.
You have but only a few precious moments to make your decision. Do you hold on to the cocoon that you have carefully, or was it carelessly, put yourself into? Will you hang onto the inner tube and go with it over the waterfall and hope that the once glorious and serene ride it provided earlier will save you if you are able to cling to it tightly enough?
Or perhaps you struggle out of the center of that inner tube and let it go on without you. While, perhaps in vain, you struggle to swim toward the safety of the shore against ever increasingly stronger currents in a valiant attempt to save yourself?
Or will you have the strength to release the inner tube knowing you are freely giving up the safety it has provided you thus far in your life, then gather all your internal strength and use it to swim against the currents towards the shore and the security that it will inevitably provide you?
Or do you simply take your chances and let the waterfall take you without your inner tube over its edge, while you welcome the flashes of your life appearing before your eyes. Letting movie style snapshots flash over your entire existence showing you once again all that you are, all that you have been and all that you are leaving behind. All the while you hope that your will to live will be sufficient enough to convince the waterfall to let you go, so you can swim triumphantly out of the mist unharmed, instead of it forcing you deep within its clutches with its overpowering currents to be forever trapped in the deep end of the pool?
Shay White
Copyright 2007
No comments:
Post a Comment