Haiku My Heart, Sacred Places

My holy water
Flows between two jungle banks
What church can compete?

This is a picture I took in 2006 of the Sebastian River in Roseland, Florida where I spent some of my growing-up years. I continue to revisit Roseland and every journey back puts a lie to "you can't go home again."
It remains there, as if time had forgotten it, that tiny village beside the banks of a slow-moving river, and whenever I return it welcomes me back with the same roads that accepted my footsteps so many years ago, with the same small houses, the same small glories, the same mystery and beauty.
It was the perfect place for a child to live- jungle and water, wild mangoes and white water birds, trees to climb, white sand roads to play marbles in, and a mysterious character named Chester who grew turnip greens, lived off the grid before there was a grid, who wore his hair and beard like Jesus when no man dared go more than a week without his visit to the barber shop.
Roseland was the womb of my imagination, and the river was the heart of it all.

It is calling me now, that river. I need to go back soon.








Haiku My Heart is the only formal blog-related thing I participate in. I do it because I love Haiku and because I love rebecca who is our gracious and glorious hostess.
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