It's a partly cloudy, partly sunny day in the Blue Ridge Mountains of northwestern North Carolina. To my right a waterfall seven or eight feet high of white water cascades down irregular dark rock. The mosses on the rock beside the falling water glow neon yellow-green when the sunlight between clouds makes the moss look like the light is coming from inside the rock. I see a bird that looks like a kind of sandpiper. It has a dark brown head, back and tail, and a white belly. It is standing in the slower moving water to the side of the waterfall's white water. The bird bobs on its legs and pecks at whatever it's eating like a sandpiper on the beach.

It flew away like a jet-bird. It flies really fast, fast as a bat. A few minutes ago it flew downstream directly in front of me. About all I saw was a streak. Tar Baby on my lap snapped his head right to left watching it go by. Several times I've seen one of these birds fly along the stream bed five to ten feet above the water so fast it was going out of sight downstream before I caught a glimpse of what zoomed by. I'll look it up in a bird book when I go back to the house. (It's a spotted sandpiper, also known as a guttersnipe).

I've never been able to determine its colors with certainty while it was flying. Seeing it fly through here I think of Luke Skywalker flying his jet- mobile through a canyon in Star Wars. Having no idea what this bird was named, I thought of it as a jet-bird. Even after I learn its name I'll go on thinking it a jet-bird.

A big gray cloud is passing over. The air looks and feels like evening all of a sudden in mid afternoon. So far it doesn't seem like a cloud with rain in it, but I'm no meteorologist. I prefer to go with what's happening and not concern myself with future possibilities or likelihoods or percentages of chance.

The weatherman before satellites made his job look more like a guessing game than a science. Then satellites came along and for several years weather forecasts started to be fairly accurate. By now, after some years with satellite, weather forecasting is rarely as accurate as before the satellites. It seems like the weather knows that it is supposed to be unpredictable, so when we catch on to its ways to where we start thinking we've got it down to a science, it turns out to be like the air that it is. It slips through our fingers when we try to take hold of it. In that way it's like spirit.

It's every bit a part of the living earth as the water flowing in the stream and the flow lines you see in rocks from their molten state when they froze into stone. They once flowed like the water in this creek. The grain in wood is created by the flow of water up the tree's trunk to the leaves. Our breathing system and heartbeat are part of this flow that is manifestation of the spirit of life in matter. Watching water flow by keeps me mindful of spirit.

When I listen closely to the music in falling water there comes a time when I hear a voice in it speaking a language I don't know. I think it's called babbling. Our bones are created by the flow. You might call the flow creative energy. The orbits of the planets are parts of the flow, the turning spiral galaxy and the entire universe too.

In a place like this I feel connected to earth below and heaven above in harmony. The flow that is the spirit of life is happening all around where I sit and within as well.

Aster is stretched out on a big rock in the stream with moss on it. I am too. She is maybe eight feet to my left on another rock. At this moment she's grooming the hair on her right rear knee with her big pink tongue. Tar Baby is off exploring, running up trees, crawling into a hole under a tree to see what's in there, looking for anything that moves. A little while ago he was standing on the edge of the rock I'm sitting on looking at something in the water that was moving with the motion of the waves on the surface.

It acted like it was alive and Tar Baby looked like he was waiting for conclusive evidence that it might be a crawdad. I don't know that he had anything in mind he could do to catch it, it being in the water, but he kept on watching its motion. It started to spook him when he couldn't figure out what it was and he became apprehensive of it, backing away slowly and checking over his shoulder as he turned to walk away. If I'd touched him he would have sprung straight up two feet.

Aster has moved to another rock. This one is covered with moss and has a cushion of last year's leaves that makes an excellent dog bed. She's watching for something to move. She thought she saw something a little bit ago and barked a few times. She continues to gaze in that direction in case whatever it was turns up again. She has me looking up there too.

After several days of dampness and light rain, the lichen and mosses that cover the rock outcroppings and the lower parts of tree trunks are glowing green today. Rhododendron leaves are spread open like umbrellas. The tiny woods violet's first leaves are popping up.

Buds are beginning to appear on the trees. Aster is lounging on the other side of the stream, looking this way.

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