Canada Lake

I'm sitting on a dock early in the morning drawing the water and the distant hills. Two specks float into my field of view. What are they? Small birds perhaps …or a loon maybe?

They are two insanely small spiders about a foot from my nose and they are parachuting through space from a tree on the shore. They do not know fear. It's that simple. I think they are unable to experience this emotion which I am all-too familiar with. They just cast out a line and step out on the morning currents. What if they land in the water? In the grand scale of evolutionary time, the fact that a wooden dock or a human (me) is there to intercept these spiders, is completely undependable.

At least one of the spiderlings was lucky: I saw it scuttling away on the page of my sketchbook. I blew a little and sent it on its merry way.

As dawn gave way to morning, the lake became the stage for other animals on different errands. These boaters motored along like arrows to get bread, milk and the newspaper from the local store at the far end of the lake. Their only problem, from a cosmic perspective is that they knew where they were going. What if they, like the spiders, stepped out on the currents and let the breezes take them to a new shore? Could they walk on water like Jesus?

Nice day for a walk!

Canada Lake 08-17-11
© 2011 Rob Dunlavey
colored pencil