Streams of gold

Those streams that once glittered with gold 

Have dried up. 

Maybe we found all they had to offer. Maybe you cut the supply. But they’re barely a trickle of muddy water now, nothing like the clear, crisp springs that winked with gold twinkling just below the surface.

No life is sustained by them now. They’re drying up. 

And this land, which holds so much life, has changed so profoundly in such a short time. The sunset’s colours changed. What the plants need is different. The soil itself holds new nutrients, new memories, a new past somehow. 

Everything is different but I’m standing in the same place. Trying to find a different shape but realising I was moulded for this place. 

No, it wasn’t always so hilly. It used to be flat and mild and predictable. Pleasant prairies that stretched for miles. I’d bide my time watching the prairie dogs chase geese and pheasants and love the land that cradled me. 

But I’m not cradled now. My senses are assaulted by Christmas-like pine air that grows thinner as I journey upwards. The path ended miles ago. I am fighting through the brush every day, leaving something walkable in my wake. 

I am so alive and so barely breathing and so lightheaded and so giddy and so overwhelmed. I am the ragged rocks on the cliff faces beside me. They invite me to jump into unwelcoming, unstretched arms. I am mesmerised by their danger, tantalised by risk, to the point of obsession. 

But instead I am fighting the brush again and again, sustaining scratches and cuts but pushing regardless. 

These mountains are beautiful but they’re hard. They used to be the delight of my eyes, now they are the burden of my hands. They capture my imagination in both beauty and danger, stimulating awe and fear and panic and wonder and life and life and life itself. 

Life itself, pouring out where the rivers once flowed. They are now inside me. Every painful branch that slaps my wrist makes more room for the river to gush in. Every shaky gasp for air is like a dam bursting from my fingertips and life begets life and begets life. 

Life, shakily and uncertainly sustained, blooming like a peony that once cradled inside itself but now stretches open and out and invites in. 

Life, piercing me with its wondrous views and terrible risks and dangling dreams like puppets on the stage of my denial and asking me to sit in the audience just a bit longer. 

Life, nudging me to take the plunge, fall flying, open wide, grasp hold of the branch and break it because I am going somewhere and I do not know where but the streams are there. 

The living water is falling over itself as it tumbles down pebbly brooks and ravines and rocky terrains and follows its own trail down to me. 

I am coming to bathe my weary soul in its waters and be weary no more. I am coming to drink of life. I am coming like a wave crashing into it, a tsunami over and under it, a deluge of desert rain bringing forth succulent growth as far as the eye can imagine. 

I am coming like the turbulent tides, the rushing current, the steely-eyed storms that wreak havoc on the ocean floor. I am coming like a woman in labour. I am coming like a beggar desperate for gold. 

I am coming like a blind man promised new eyes, like a lame man dragging himself towards wherever he can find life. I am coming like a woman weak with blood loss and invigorated by ridiculous, crazy, hopeless faith that lets logic drown in yesterday’s games as she races recklessly towards the one she puts her faith in. 

I’m running there like a poor man with nothing to bring and nothing to own. Untethered by the world’s routines and baseline norms and everyday things. I am shedding that stable prairie life and all its beautiful stillness, trading it for this violent rush of earthquakes and storms and beauty and new mountains formed and new lungs to breathe the air that pours from them. I am coming like an alcoholic desperate to leave the pain. 

Now transfixed with life and its bursting, more than gold that fades.