Common Ground...

Both the image and the poem from yesterday's post have stayed with me, calling me from whatever else it was that I thought I was going to post. (I sometimes wonder who else this happens to - I want to post on one thing, but another won't quit hitting me over the head until I post on it.)

The image that is sticking with me is the idea of springs as common places, places where we put aside our quarrels for a time for the precious gifts of the spring: water, calm, warmth, healing... I think about trips up to a local warm spring to help my muscles, and how that spring has been considered public ground certainly since the foundation of this country, and possibly before British colonialism, when many local tribes considered springs to be sacred meeting places, where people could go without fear.

I think about the simple tap, there beside what used to be the gentlemen's bathhouse, where anyone may go and get springwater to carry away or to drink. I think about the pools where anyone may wade, while the guppies and crawdads investigate the fascinating pink toes...

I think about meeting my parents there, about how it felt to have that calm peacefulness invaded by the knowlege that Dad was going again, about how it felt to have that gulf between us, there on the common ground. I think about how we've planned to meet again over water, this time to go canoeing downriver together. Perhaps the river can take us again to a kind of common ground...