I was 9 or 10 years old when I jumped headlong into soul. Another way you might say that — I was 9 or 10 years old when I was born.

My family had just moved to the country, to a suburb of Atlanta called Sandy Springs. Sandy Springs at that time consisted of a grocery store, a drug store, a hardware store and a filling station. It was wilderness on the edge of a growing city. We lived on 35 acres of land along the Chattahooche River that my grandmother bought when Atlanta was young. She offered some land for building a home to each of her five children.

My father chose a hill overlooking the lake. The land meant everything to him. He finally built a home and seduced my mother into moving the family.

There was tension in paradise. The more my father and my siblings and I grew to love the woods, the more my mother grew to hate them. She felt isolated; tired of driving the sixteen or so miles of country roads to and from Atlanta several times a day, angry my father chose to live his mother’s dream instead of hers.

My childhood was spent wandering the woods, making forts, and discovering my inner life. The silent presence of the woods and the whispering sirens of nature created in me a temple.

Whatever needs I couldn’t get met in my early life, I got them met a hundred fold in the experience of my waterfall. This lovely, natural sanctuary was a short distance from our home, near the lake. The Van I know was created at that time.

My waterfall was the kind of presence who knew exactly what I needed whether I was upset, excited, or just looking for someone to talk to. Just stepping on to her moist, mossy rocks opened up the closed places in me and released my soul to tell her everything.

I felt safe with her, felt cuddled by her warm rocks, bathed in the lullabies of her water music. Those whispering waters allowed me to access that delicate chord of oneness with all of life. From that experience, that early encounter with wholeness, I carried within an awareness, a resonance that zeroed in like a homing pigeon on experiences of wholeness throughout my life.

It seems God took the soul of that waterfall and placed that soul in me. With the matter and spirit of rock and water music, God created my essence. The hours I spent just sitting and listening in that sacred space allowed the slow wearing away in me of any resistance to what it was God wanted me to know. I knew God in an intimate way and God knew me.

I carry that waterfall within me today. It continues to nurture and to inform me. It creates in me a safety that nothing outside of me can dismantle. It serves as container for all the experiences entering my psyche, a holy place within where I can sort out feelings and reflections. It defines me. It forms the center of my personality. 

Our life is a page of possibility until we write on it, flesh it out, create our own personal myth. It takes time to listen, to be ready, to not make mindless moves until the energy stirs within, before the light emerges from the darkness, before the whisper rises out of the silence.

Like Michelangelo, we sit before the formless clay of our life and wait until it speaks. Only then do we know who or what wants to take form. Creating a life is a dialogue, a joint effort. We are artists, standing before the empty canvas of our life, struggling, trying things out, until the image hidden there emerges. Only then can the image move through us and tell a story, our story.

My waterfall experience became for me a paradigm for how to process information, how to access soul. It has also served to help me determine the quality of different relationships throughout my life. If I felt as safe and as alive with someone as I felt sitting on my waterfall, I knew this was a healthy, supportive, peaceful relationship. These anchor my life.

I consciously create myself one day at a time from the root of this one life circumstance: I lived in the woods as a child and was mothered by a waterfall. This colors my spirituality and the way I relate to the world. It is the rainbow color that set me on the path to creating my own rainbow out of the experiences of my life.

Other colors emerge and present themselves to me in continual flow. This was true, particularly, at significant stages of development in my life, moments of creation and re-creation, not always pleasant. I add these new colors to the base color of my waterfall experience. The external circumstances and focus of my life change as I add new color, new dimension, but the base color that directs and informs my becoming is always present.

Life is often hectic, confusing, demanding, as well as profound and meaningful and delicious. We create ourselves anew each day out of the colors of the moment.