“Digression is the most delightful part of everything. If you don’t digress and go off point you miss the point of everything.” –Maira Kalman, author and illustrator*

On Paddling Deeper In

I zipped my phone into the front pocket of my purse, stashed it beneath a pile of reusable grocery bags in the back of the car, and walked to the edge of the boat ramp where my borrowed kayak sat waiting. 

I pushed the boat into the water, stepped inside, and was immediately sorry I’d left my phone behind. I wanted to photograph the reflection of a fallen tree, whose trunk arced like a muscular snake above the water, and whose still surface replied with an answering curve below.

Then again, I was relieved not to have the phone and the worry of getting it wet. Also, I was glad to be immersed in the quiet stillness of early evening that was imposed by its absence. And so, I dipped my paddle into the water and pulled—and I let myself be pulled—into the lucid palette of greens and golds and many shades of anticipated night. There was the dusky gray of trees and the midnight darkness of a beaver’s sleek head as it skittered across their shadows.

I slid into a narrower stream and emerged into a burst of light splashing on the blue surface of a pond. A family of mergansers bobbed along, with their shadow flock paddling on their backs beneath their swimming feet.

I paddled hard across the swelling ridges of the clouds that hurried past beneath my boat. I slid willfully into delighted disorientation: a tree stump at the water’s edge shaped like the silhouette of a miniature mountain sloping downward to a point, and whose reflection completed the impression of an oversized bird’s bill, half-submerged. I pulled up close to tufts of grass at the water’s edge whose reversed doubles were clearer than the vegetation. I had to reassure myself that the world bound by the laws of nature and gravity above the waterline, was more real than the crystalline images echoed below. 

Two hours later, the day’s flame about to puff into night, I dragged the boat onto the muddy riverbank, retrieved my purse, and zipped my topsy turvy happiness inside my heart.

Is this the dream’s appeal: A world hidden below the surface of the one that bobs so self-assuredly above? One so real it topples what we think we know? The lure of a destination we can never quite describe on our return?

I lay in bed that night feeling foreign in my familiar skin—awake, but barely—and paddling deeper in.

© 2021 Tzivia Gover, all rights reserved

*But I Digress

Today’s blog post was written during an hour I had designated for working on my book about the connections between dreams and writing. Instead, I took an unplanned turn into reflecting on my experience on the water the day before. But as it turns out, the digression led me back to my center. Writing about my time on the river, an experience that can’t otherwise be documented — especially one in which one’s sense of perspective is altered so as to reveal a deeper truth — is what this post, and for that matter dreams and writing, are all about.

Let’s Keep Connected

• Learn more from my books: https://thirdhousemoon.com/books-by-tzivia/ 
• Follow me on Instagram: @tziviadreams 

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Featured image by jayemusic, Pixabay