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Secret Places I recently took my sons and our dog for a walk through my childhood neighborhood. We walked to an enormous reservoir that was filled with water all summer after unseasonable rains. After months, it's finally dry desert again. We walked toward a massive cottonwood tree that survived the last couple of months being totally submerged under water. Setting out toward this tree from our house only should have been a mile or so. However, since my childhood, this desert meadow has been dug out into a reservoir and fenced in with barbed wire. The one mile walk to a secret entrance turned into four miles (and illegal). Tired and needing to rest, the five of us arrived to find this beautiful shady tree with long grass growing under its covering. Nearby, some debris left over from the summer's flood jutted out from deep mud. Otherwise, it was all a scene from a secret country meadow. I kept feeling like I was supposed to visit this place a long time ago when I was a child, but I somehow never made it. It seemed this cottonwood tree has been calling me to keep it company, and to listen to her secrets and wisdom. Finding an old tire and piece of rope, I fashioned a country style tire swing and strung it up around the tree's strongest arm. As we all took turns swinging, I heard her chuckle in the breeze, her crispy winter leaves tickled by our play. It seemed she prattled and smiled so much that she forgot to tell me the message she held on to all these years. Or perhaps she did. Before, I would have felt sorry for this tree in all her hidden life, but all the passer-bys on the highway are really the lonely ones. Only the few who are willing to pull away from the main street, break the rules, and play like children escape their isolation by coming to this lonely place. It seems that when we give reverence to the forgotten places of our past, we are free to move into our future. It seems like we have to go to lonely places to be healed of our aloneness and enter into full fellowship and communion with the nature of God. -Jacob
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