Curious Creek

December 1, 2025

Greetings from the current,

She knew somewhere in lost threads of dreams where she was from, where she was born, but she rarely thought about that.  She was only focused on where she was going next, wanted to feel how here would turn into there.

She slid between a narrow place in the mossy floor of the forest, raising up a little as she rushed through the channel and into a fork in the bed, the remnants of an old maple wedged in the mud.  She surrounded the island for a moment and splashed a small wave of greeting and then swept past.

The sun was moving between ribbons of gauzy clouds into creases of blue, framed by the canopy of the forest. She was aware of it moving across the sky, wondered for a moment if the sun felt the same curiosity about its path that seemed to possess her. She rolled absently for a moment, felt the sun’s glint on her surface, let it shimmer in the dappled places, diamonds glittering.  She loved the warmth and so gave the light a place to be as a gift of gratitude.

When she was young, she was barely a trickle, soil ebbing drops into a low place, rain and melted snow gathering momentum, seeking the same way, pooling and spilling and forming threads of water, becoming and growing.  She could feel that beginning without thinking of it,  an awareness, like the air above her and the feel of the silty bed below her. 

A heron stepped gingerly into her where the long grasses lined the bank, now standing still, peering down. For a moment it seemed it was looking at its own reflection and then she felt the fish there, hovering in her current, their mouths miming silent conversations.

She was seeking something without knowing it, following herself further and lower. She sensed her own curiosity as if it were something separate that she carried.  She could feel the earth bending, the land turning, and part of her awareness wanted to know where that all led.

She came to a ridge of rocks strewn across her way and bounded over them, sluiced around a fallen oak, its roots still grasping into the air from where it had ripped from the shore. The world dropped suddenly and she leapt into the air for a moment, happy to feel the air in her, foaming and bubbling, making a happy noise among the giant stones.  She sent waves to the shores, carving new shapes in the soil, little notes that she had been there.

The edges of the forest moved back and gave her more room, and she slowed again, wearing a smattering of maple leaves, delighted at how they looked there on her marbled finish.  A little breeze swept across the open place and stippled her surface, spinning the leaves like pinwheels. She held an old birch branch, seeping into it, feeling it’s bark, soaking into the sapwood, exploring the porous places. The branch bobbed on her surface, and she felt its melancholy.

Ducks paddled in the calm behind the deadfall, and she lifted the smaller ones up on gentle rolling ebbs. Long locks of green waved in the mudbed.  She felt another creek emptying from a crease in the forest, calling her name as it became one with her, a soft gurgling sigh.

She pushed on between small sand cliffs, still feeling the urge to go, to know, to see. It was not her nature to pause for long.

She was growing, which surprised her a little, and she sensed she was moving faster.  It made her laugh as she splashed over moss covered boulders in the middle of her channel, sending an arm of water into the air, waving at the trees watching from shore.  She sluiced between two slabs of granite wedged in the wet earth below her, danced into a whirlpool just for the joy of it.

The world on either side steadily eased past but was not left behind.  That meant something, she realized. The shore was here but it was also there.

She swam into an eddy between a fallen ash and a collection of rocks, floated in slow turns. The need to go, to be elsewhere pushed at the center of the current, but she needed to pay attention to something.  She could feel that there was no there more important than here.  She knew life passing from her first drops, through this place, was the same, even though she was always changing. She still felt the curiosity, but sensed she already knew the bends, the falls, the pools, the giant rivers, the lakes and lagoons, the ocean.

Somewhere beyond the trees she could feel the snowmelt, the rain in the air, felt it joining in places, not really considering its future, not really choosing, but tracing its place in the order marked for it before time.  Rivulets became streams became creeks, became rivers, went here and there, carving in the soil, changing the world, wearing through stone. That power surged in her like the cascading falls in the mountains.

Even as she felt the calm of this pool, she knew the rush of rapids and the crash of waves.  She was both at her beginning and searching for her future that was already part of her, somewhere beyond this bend, beyond the next waterfall, beyond this day.

And still she knew she was not made to be still, because the world called to her.

Hope this finds you flowing,

David

Copyright © 2025 David Smith