A quiet stream with gurgling water, a spattering of rocks along the bottom. My young child plays nearby, the water just high enough for him to splash in without worrying about him getting hurt. I sit on a rock, my baby nestled in my arms.

I opened my eyes to a prenatal yoga class full of other heavily pregnant women. I struggled to stand up from where I was snuggled into a nest of yoga pillows and blankets.

Four years later, I open my eyes, coming back from the same scene. My children are sitting on the couch on either side of me, leaning into me the same way I relaxed on that nest of pillows years before. I glance at my phone screen to a video of a cartoon dog in his own private reverie imaging his “peaceful place” as part of the breathing exercises we do before the kids’ bedtimes. And I realize that my peaceful place is no longer an imaginary one – it’s a real one. In fact, we had visited it the Saturday before.

In the midst of pandemic lockdown, we’ve been making trips to nearby trails. Our area is still allowing folks to go out for the sake of exercise, so we’ve been keeping our distance from fellow hiker/walkers. To minimize crowds, we’ve stuck to our local nature center. While we had been there before, it was only a few times a year. Now that we’re there nearly every week, we’ve found parts of it we had never before explored.

One of them was the stream. Flowing under the bridge to the main trails, it was always there. But we had never really paid attention to it. Now it’s become our refuge.

Rambling along, we veer off the main path and down to the creek. There is the gurgling water, the spattering of rocks. There are the children splashing about, the water never high enough to pose a risk of anything but wet feet.

In some ways, at some times, it’s just as I imagined it, peaceful and quiet.

In other ways and other times, it’s not. It’s my younger son picking up giant rocks and hauling them into the water, with us amazed he hasn’t dropped one on his foot yet. It’s my older son taunting his younger brother that he now somehow has the “magic stick.” It’s litter and broken glass in the stream that teenagers left here when they came to illicitly drink beer.

But it’s also so much more. Applauding in pride as my older son finesses his way down a log without falling in. Laughing together as the kids who claimed “I won’t get my feet wet!” splash right down into the water. Wondering at the beauty of tiny waterfalls and schools of minnows. Watching my older son hold out his hand to my younger son as he makes his way across a gap in the trail.

I never thought that I would actually find the place that my mind conjured up in that yoga class. But taking the time to dig deep into one particular place helped me see something that I had simply walked by before. And it was more beautiful than I had imagined.

(Originally published on Facebook on May 14, 2020.)