Water

The trees sway back and forth with leaves all yellow and green and colored more by crickets rubbing their tiny legs together over and over. God or Nature or the eternal crashing of things happening can’t matter when you’re walking through these trees, these forests of living, breathing atmospheric motes rubbing against your skin like little affectionate cats do. It doesn’t matter as you climb uphill, when the trees start to thin out and the horizon line looming up ahead begins to lower as you ascend higher. There is no meaning to the thousand year sutras or apocryphal stories when that horizon line breaks and the trees sway to either side and reveal the giant body of water that stretches on and on, traversing up ahead of you like the experiences of all your ancestors combined. When you’re standing there overlooking the sublime vision of water, the waves churning and sweeping together as one, the caressing slushing and sloshing soothes your aching heart after a long day or a long week or a long month or a long lifetime. The gray-black cemented life, the neon-orange-sign with a side of medium fries life, the shrieking sirens intruding into your own bedroom life, the crying child in the cereal aisle life–these lives are nothing compared to the nothingness-feeling of overlooking Lake Michigan at sunset, miles away from self-serve unleaded. You feel like a needle in a haystack, a red crayon lost in the sock drawer, a candle in an empty temple.