I actually wrote this in the summer but never got around to uploading it until now. Kind of odd I guess, but I figured I hadn't said much lately.

***********************************************************


A short walk from where I live there lies a small secluded spot. The patch of tall marshy grasses along the creek is only accessible by crossing on a fallen tree and traversing up stream about 20 meters or so along a narrow path through the trees.

The place is always quiet, so I go there often to sit and think, or listen, or watch the water foul. There's a couple of mallards there. A male and female swimming together. I believe they had ducklings recently, though I didn't see them this last time I came. There's also those ducks with the big heads that like to dive under water; I forget what they're called (not that I ever knew). Bright red dragonflies flit about along the tops of the grasses, and fish (trout?) are often seen breaking the surface in a flurry of silver flashes as they catch insects mid-air.

Sadly, all around this sanctuary are signs of our modern and often reckless and domineering human existence. The buzz of traffic on the highway nearby can be heard. Various coloured markers can be seen hanging from tree branches; what they signify, I know not, but fear the worst; I pray the oft needed but sadly destructive hands of housing development should never find this place. It would be a shame to see such prime water front property marred by a couple of houses. The creek itself passes in a large concrete culvert under the highway from the hospital on the other side, and the tractor trimmed grass of a large dog park and walking path lie just on the other side of the narrow band of trees that lines the opposite bank.

Yet, despite the close proximity of these human influences, the creatures here seem hardly perturbed by any of it. There's a wildness about them. Upon my approach the ducks and mallards swim hastily away, hiding under the low hanging branches of a tree that graze the surface of the water. Eventually, they grow less weary of my presence and reemerge from hiding; still they try to avoid and ignore me. This is of course in contrast to a place like Beacon Hill Park where the ducks swarm you hoping for food.

I often wish I could be like these animals, and this place. Always safe and secluded in a quiet sanctuary. The self-destructive modern human society all around, yet somehow unable to fully penetrate. To be always aware of it yet never corrupted and drawn up into it. To be able to always live the life God created me to live, allowing others in to share some of the experience, yet still weary of them should they attempt to tear down my heart and rebuild it into a cold mechanical pump of secular sludge and waste, turning my life from a Godly Sanctuary into a Devilish Suburbia.