UP RIVER March 10/10

Looking up the valley
White butterflies are very noticeable amongst the rank weeds
dancing around, creating a lot of movement – beautiful

There’s noise of river rushing
Sound of the locust
And little high chirping bird noises

Kapanui is the most distant mountain
a blue-grey in the distance against a pale blue sky
A land cloud just puffing up behind it
Creating darker shadows
Valley sides dark too with green pine trees climbing to rim the hills
And centred is a glorious golden grassy rounded mound
Just wonderful

And of course the closer you get, the more variety of trees you see
Spindly leafed birches – you can see through the branches
Spiky looking macrocarpa
and a dead tree in silhouette against it

The river has lots of blue in reflection of the sky
and has a beautiful curve here
where I’m sitting on a rock face
dropping in steps to plunge into deep water
Curving off to the right, then to the left and right again
and away round the bend
Right in front of me is this deep green pool
so clear you see the rocks and stones on the bottom
So deep you can see the colour that’s in the water
glorious, just glorious
Even closer in front of me is grey rock, green lichen
And sparking out, in such contrast
are little dandelion flowers reaching out towards the light
From where I sit in shadow

Something amazing about water patterns
endlessly enchanting to watch
diamond sparkles where it ripples
Still surface over the deep in front
but in the shallows over stones
quite even ripples – beautiful
and the play of light, lines of stripes of yellow over rocks
All the different colours of the stones
Right in front a great rock extruding out of the ground
(Strange to thing I’m looking at the bedrock
I’m looking at the planet – not just what sits on it)

The ripples have come upriver blown by the wind
They’re forming patterns like fish scales
Even diamond sort of shapes

There’s a feeling you get when you’re close to deep water
Hanging over a rock – your toes tingle
There’s a feeling of peace looking into the deep
But also a slight tremble of imagining the alien environment

Upstream, birds are on the edge – maybe ducks
but I see a flick of white – pukeko then

The quick roar of train over tracks
interrupts my reverie on rocks
just sitting there over the river
And yet from their roundness and thrown heaps
there has been such movement

Those butterflies are so busy
dancing their way through life
I’d love being like that
Just beautiful to follow them flutter on their own
and meeting one another they whirl round and round together
playing with each other
Joymusing to be like that with friends!

This day of sun – this is happiness!