Meditations: Solace

There is a photo from my early childhood that continually resurfaces in my mind. I was three or four years old. I am fast asleep, cuddling with a long, skinny Crystal Geyser water bottle which was half the length of my small body. My head and legs are laid out across an egg shaped boulder as if it were a mattress. My unkempt, sandy blond hair hangs half off the edge of the stone and half from the contours of my freckled face. The bright light from the sun reflects sharply off the creek that enfolds my makeshift cot on all sides and shines through the bottle like a prism. When I see the image, the warmth and peacefulness radiate through the time that separates me from this version of myself. I become that little girl, deeply asleep on her rock island, embraced by the sun in complete comfort and safety. 

When I was about this same age, I used to shimmy into the crawl space underneath our house and dig for salamanders and bugs in the cool, wet earth for hours. I was in my own world down there, where nobody else could enter.  “It’s not safe for you to go down there!” my father would say. But it felt like the safest place in the world. 

I have always found safety and solace in the earth -- the streams, the trees, the dirt.