Much of the allure of my sit spot is the exciting and rare prospect of alone time. I often feel that the only time I’m truly alone is when I finally get to sleep at night, so purposefully taking myself out of the hectic swing of things and onto the island allows me the reflective respite I need. The paragraph in our Twelve by Twelve reading in which Powers discusses the difference between being alone and lonely resonated with me. It reminded me of how much healthier I feel when I have had time like this to be silent, meditative, and centered. I think the proximity to water is the reason that this spot has this effect on me. Even though I’ve grown up around rivers, the mystery of bodies of water never ceases. When everything else seems so fixed, water continues to swirl and run, evaporate and fall. As I lightly swayed in my hammock, I began thinking about the way in which Siddhartha (in Siddhartha, by Herman Hesse) finally reaches the state of peace that he has been seeking: by sitting and contemplating a river with an ancient boatman until he can finally hear the voices of the river. When I sit by the lake, I feel only a small fraction of Siddhartha’s “Om—perfection,” of course, but I still enjoy thinking about water as having “hundreds of voices, thousands of voices” (Hesse 135)
When I sit by the water, I am often only paying full attention to the ducks, geese, and (if I’m lucky) herons, but the way that Hesse describes water itself is so full of the life and familiarity that I notice only when I am looking for it. Water in the form of rivers and lakes is ever changing, but also gives off an impression of permanency. The water that Siddhartha observes “changed to vapor and rose, became rain and came down again, became spring, brook and river, changed anew, flowed anew” (135), as does the water in the lake, in the James, in the Shenandoah, and in the Clarion. I wonder whether I ever come into contact with the “same” water again? Where in the world is the water that we saw in the James River last Thursday? And the Clarion River water I swam in all summer? I suppose I’ve moved on since those moments as much as the water has, but when I carve out time to wonder at the mysteries of water, this fact never ceases to amaze me.