Soul Food

Yesterday a spate of sunshine between weekend storms sent me scurrying out of the office, down into the Mission Gorge to sit on a rock at a bend in the San Diego River. At that point the river is narrow (average 8' across) and deep (maybe 2' at most). It's what we call a "crick" (creek) back home in the Midwest. Was it Annie Dillard who taught me to sit facing upstream to watch the future approaching? I mused how the rippling waters had once trickled over rocky bolders on Vulcan Mountain and drained out of pastures in the placid and beautiful Santa Ynez valley, following the inexorable pull of gravity toward the Pacific Ocean. Small movements caught my peripheral attention. I gazed at a nearby branch snagged on the rock. Gradually the debris and mud-coated bark resolved into two small sinuous lizards, warming themselves. When one's metabolism was up to speed, he began the comic lizard push-ups, inflating his vivid, electric blue throat sack, signally his ardor to the other, smaller female. She ran away, far away, upstream into the weeds. He turned and marched off downstream, leaving me alone with the sparkling, chuckling waters. This was my gift to myself, replenishing the writerly spirit. Was it Thoreau who said, "If thou has a loaf of bread, sell half and buy a hyacinth to feed thy soul"?

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