Healing by a Creek

I do not know what exactly I am at. A bit sleepy, a bit relaxed, bit worried, a bit ... everything. Almost.

I do not know whether I want to do this right now, but I trust the cathartic effect blogging has had on me in the past. So I write, not knowing clearly what it is that I mean to type and this is certainly not automatic writing. 

May be I shall write about a creek, only, why a creek I don't know...

A creek is a smallish water inlet, a stream that comes inland which has a tidal swell-ebb behavior. 

That's almost all that I know regarding a creek! Chances are, my definition above may be incorrect. One thing is certain: A creek pertains to a water body.

My creek here has a regular deep olive, brackish water hue. That already indicates sea not too far.

There are rocks with barnacles, sharp shelled and dirty. The tides have silt grey gooey deposits between the cracks through which water weed and other swamp trees grow. These are low trees, spreading along horizontally, with small thick leaves. They bear small fruit, inedible and full of sap. They ripen and fall in the stream making that peculiarly soothing sound,'gullugck-pitt'! The branches are twisted. When seen against night sky their silhouettes spook you out. The air is salty, it smells marine, a musty constant wet smell. Muddy hued branches have incisions made by sharp claws of crows and other birds, may be animals and other creatures more at ease on hard ground than water. During high tides when marine life is brought into the tangles of these trees those animals feed on them, or may be, if they are at all there then they feed on them. Those animals with sharp claws are never sighted. They go about their business surreptitiously. 

But birds chirp and crows caw. Kingfishers sit on extended branches, not crying, not moving, hoping that they would turn grey like the bank or the branch upon which they perch. They are stone still but conspicuous! And yet they catch good deal of fish. The blue of their wing sparkles, juxtaposed with the blaze of the orange and the red of their beaks off-set by their tiny red feet against unshapely grey branches. They are by far the most beautiful dots in sight along the creek's length .

My creek's source and end are only assumed. No one has ever told anything about the beginning and end of my creek. When you describe her, you describe only a segment, a small portion of her meandering length. My creek, in spite of herself, arouses mystery in the mind which cares to look at her and wonder, but for most part my creek is a blind spot: she is there, and yet not there because she is always so there that you don't notice.

This is mostly as she is in clear weather. In torrential rains my creek disappears, her waters merge with the great downpour somewhere midair almost, as if several zillion kith rush on to meet their many zillion kin in a massive watery collective embrace -a many mouthed kiss, colossal - rendering every visible object an invisible grey mist.

That is her only moment of truth. Moment when she seems animated and demonstrative. Otherwise my creek exists god like non-existent; flowing, feeding, giving, helping from her one imagined end to the other asking nothing in return.

Sometimes when I do not know what exactly I am at, confused or troubled, I imagine myself sitting by my creek, listening to the story she seems to tell, and with the turn of  tide my peace returns.