The Wide Sky

In my childhood I used to spend every summer in a village, not far from a cozy small town named Zvenigorod. Its brick buildings that contain dozens of apartments stand side by side to private wooden houses with their own gardens. The town grew on a bank of the Moskva River, and all the dwellings are scattered on riverside fields and high hills. The image of the town is incomplete without dense pine forests that surround this place from every direction.
A monastery, the heart of the town, towers on one of the numerous neighboring hills. Just by its walls a viewing point was built. It is a particular feeling to taste hot sbiten, made of honey and mint, with fresh cabbage pies, baked right there and right now, simultaneously observing vast environs that are clearly seen for kilometers.
Living nearby, I have been to Zvenigorod for billion times. Well, maybe, not so many but enough. I saw the town in October when an early fall sunset was painting already yellow leaves golden and a distant village was wrapped up either with a mist or with a smoke of chimneys.
I saw the town in every season but I have never descended down the monastery hill. A narrow belt of trees stretches past its foot, over a meadow. Such a grove is a sure sign of some tiny stream hidden inside. Again and again I used to think that I would explore it next time and finally did.
The slope was so steep that the gravity itself led me down. Less than in a minute I found myself standing on a small bridge hammered of boards. I had guessed: there was a shallow river under crowns. Some trunks were bending so close to the water surface that when I sat on one, I could dip my legs into the flow and my eyes into the sky. Both of them were bright blue that day.
Waterweeds follow that stream, and it is so quiet that except the murmur of water “you can hear grass grow in the forest” and nothing more.
Since then I visit my little river every time I go to Zvenigorod. It became a tradition, a ritual. Like a pagan, I strive to meet the spirit of this secret place near the Christian monastery. It makes no sense to choose between religions. The point is to see the beauty of everything around you.
That stream flows into the Moskva River, not broad there, that carries its waters to Oka, Volga and, after all, to the Caspian Sea to turn into steam. The steam as a rain comes back to sources to repeat the circle like a soul in Buddhism. To be near the smallest river is to be a part of the whole world, of the eternity.