Palm Of Your Hand
A Story
My friend Emily posed the question, “who holds your happiness in their hands, or what?” The first thing that came to mind was water, we had just pulled over at a local spring to fill our water bottles with cold clear delicious water. Water in any form, salt or fresh, vast or creek sized, frozen or flowing.
Last year while hiking along the Soça River in Slovenia, a river so beautiful it brought me to tears. I spent a fair few miles reflecting on all the beautiful water ways I have seen, drank from, jumped in.
In Summer I had enjoyed the beautiful waters of Lake Charlevoix in Michigan, sailing and swimming. Then winter I traveled to central Norway where I spent afternoons snow shoeing up a river, who created the most incredible sounds as water rushed and gurgled hidden underneath several feet of snow. Farther up the river frozen waterfalls created walls of ice of ethereal light green in the sunshine. In march I arrived above the Arctic Circle, water was still very much in its frozen forms: ice burgs floating in the Norwegian Sea, deep snow on the mountains and sheets of beautifully pattered ice covered tide pools. I was also living on a tiny island, surrounded by shallow seas of brilliant blues, where I watched tides grown and fall, floated in sea kayaks and jumped into the half frozen pond by the sauna.
And then, in Slovenia I met the Soca, a river claimed by many to be one of the most beautiful in the world. The color must be seen in person to fully understand, no description of blue or clarity will do it justice. And the life of this river, relentless, forceful and voluminous. Perhaps most unique her source, it is not a glacier high up in the Alps but it flows out from underneath a mountain, mysterious and most definitely a gift from mother earth.
This list is endless: secretive mountain lakes in the Andes, freezing cold rivers in the Olympics, warmer waters of Thai beaches, the vastness of Lake Superior, tiny and sweet tasting alpine rivers, and most recently, the waters of Alaska. Inlets where glacial fresh water met salt, where salmon came back from the Pacific to find their origin, river upon river fed by glaciers and melting mountain snows, endless.
