Light on Water

13 April 2010

I have to tell you about what happened. It was Tuesday and I had driven to Berkeley to my old writing group. We had met at Alison’s house, up in the hills, a view of the bay with the city peaking through the redwoods, the house, old and funky, beat wood floors, a huge fireplace. It was cool enough to light the wood waiting and we wrote in friendship and warmth as the mystery of the unconscious spilled out. But it was after this, after the hugs good-bye, the date with Ellen for lunch the next day finalized, that I drove to Tilden Park. My friend Mary and I used to walk there, in 1991, when I would drive down from Sacramento to go to school three days a week at the same PhD program Mary was soon to finish. I slept on her sofa. We would walk and talk for hours in Tilden Park. But since those times, I’ve only found my way back once. I thought that I would just slip over there for a long walk, before heading to my friend Brigid’s house.

But I couldn’t find my way. I knew when I drove past the “Welcome to Contra Costa County” sign that I had gone too far and turned around on the winding road and headed back. I decided to settle for the lake as there was a sign pointing clearly to the right. At least I would get there and I had just been writing about a lake, albeit the one on my parents’ farm. There was a path that went around the lake. “Rough Path” the sign said and they were right. Up rocks, over roots from the giant eucalyptus trees that were as big as my arm, under low hanging boughs from the pine trees. I climbed and descended, avoided the mud, jumped over the streams, carefully navigated the rocks. On the opposite side of the lake there was a boulder, long and flat that jutted out into the water and I found myself drawn to it. Though the air was cool, the rock warmed me and I sat watching the water.

At first, I noticed the usual, some ducks swimming off to the left, the water brown with the silt from the spring runoff, the sound of men working across the lake by the parking lot where I’d started walking. Then I got caught in looking at the water. The ripples in the water gave the water a dense look, as if I was looking at the skin of a giant, mud coated hippopotamus who was twitching his skin. I laughed at my imagination. Then the light changed and there were diamonds of light moving across the water swirling with the waves the wind made, sometimes moving across the lake, sometimes moving right towards me. The diamonds grew large, so large that I could see blue light mixed into the white, as if they were in fact stones of light with depth and shadow of their own. They danced all over, sometimes to my left, sometimes directly in front of me. Sometimes there were hundreds, sometimes four or five and then disappearing only to suddenly shine out in a different place as the wind shifted and the light changed. I sat watching, searching for answering light within me, looking to see if these flames of light would trigger an answering fire. My body remained silent, only my mind relaxed, opened, let these flickers of light move in and out of my field of awareness at will until the light changed again and the lake was brown with the wrinkled skin of an old hippo and there was no light anywhere. It was suddenly cold, the rock no longer warm. I had been sitting too long and needed to walk to warm myself. But something had shifted. Even though my body was tired, hungry, cold, I felt as if I’d been given a secret glimpse into what is possible. I felt privileged. And so I walked carefully over roots and rocks, through the mud, back to my car. I spoke to the ducks before they swam off. I thanked the lake.

They say where two or three are together, that’s church. They say God can touch us at any moment. They say it is simply a dream this life, a dream that hides the truth. I don’t know about any of that. All I know is there was this light on the water that was so beautiful that I knew for that moment that I was seeing something holy. And that if I am allowed to see such beauty, I must be beloved.