Remembering

I had a great walk at Brazos Bend park last Saturday. It feels, and has always felt, so natural for me to be out in the woods. I think smell has a lot to do with it, and that's also why I like gardening. But it's also the sight of the path bending and disappearing into the trees and brush and wondering where it might lead. And the way that everything just is the way it is -- sometimes tangled, sometimes straight, grains of soil and huge oaks coexisting in a single system by being themselves. Nobody says to the grass "you should be shorter and more uniform in height," or to the trees, "you shouldn't shed leaves on the path." Very Tao.
On the path, there was a bench with a plaque in someone's memory. I don't know why it stood out to me so strongly. Maybe it was because we lost Maggie a few weeks ago, and Keith was up in Austin at a funeral. It struck me that if I could pick my own way to be remembered, that I couldn't do better than this. To be a bench, in a state park, to be remembered through an object of use to people who never knew me in a place like this -- what could be better? It made me want to write a poem for the first time in forever. I still might, but I need to get this thought out in case I don't. I can't express the depth of being there, but at least I can say it was deep.