a poem that winds through me

5/5/24

Fear
by
Kahlil Gibran

 	
It is said that before entering the sea
a river trembles with fear.

She looks back at the path she has traveled,
from the peaks of the mountains,
the long winding road crossing forests and villages.

And in front of her,
she sees an ocean so vast,
that to enter
there seems nothing more than to disappear forever.

But there is no other way.
The river can not go back.

Nobody can go back.
To go back is impossible in existence.

The river needs to take the risk
of entering the ocean
because only then will fear disappear,
because that’s where the river will know
it’s not about disappearing into the ocean,
but of becoming the ocean.


This poem is in the public domain.

Today I saw a corn snake. I approached her gently because I wasn't sure if she was a copperhead, and it was only after I verified that I knew. I was thankful I saw her in my yard. She will feast on rodents who I'd rather not have around, she will be fed. The cycle of life will be happy.

It was a little bit challenging to identify her because she was darker-colored and more dull on the back half of her two-foot winding body than she was on the front, where she was much brighter and orange red.

Transition. She's in transition and shedding her skin. The same theme is present in rivers that wind their way from mountains to sea. I have always been fascinated with rivers and the radical acceptance one must have once one enters the flow or even becomes the flow. I'm also fascinated with deltas where rivers pour out into the sea. I take this imagery quite seriously as a mountain girl living at the gulf where literal white grains of sand come from quartz high in the mountains where my feet have hiked. My path to living in this area is much like a river, trusting what is in the past to wash out to sea and trusting the Divine to mitigate the difference between what needs to go and what needs to stay or be filtered through a deeper process. The Divine Delta.

Perhaps I do fear what is ahead of me. But that's because I don't know what it's like to pass into the grace of the open ocean.

And I know that it's coming.

These images were both taken by me.

One is a picture of a river near the Adirondacks and the other is the beach here in Perdido Key.