At six this morning, before beginning a retreat, I paused for a while out in the lake.A wayward crimson leaf was drifting across the water.At first, I simply watched the leaf.Then, slowly, I noticed the wider water carrying it.Small waves lifted me and passed beneath, travelling towards it.The wind shifted across the surface, and the surface moved the leaf.Yet the leaf moved the water, too.Small ripples travelled outwards in circles, meeting other circles, disappearing into them.Somewhere, I thought, these waves had been wind.And before that, perhaps a swirling distant storm set in chaotic motion by a butterfly.Before that, I could not know.After a while, I could no longer tell which movement belonged to what.Even my watching seemed caught adrift within it.But this was not confusion.Rather, for a moment, it seemed strange to call anything separate.A leaf.A wave.My floating body in water.Nothing I could see appeared to truly begin anywhere.Nor quite finish, either.Even I seemed less an interruption than another movement the lake had briefly learned to carry.Then I began swimming again.My goggles bobbed high, and the lake opened ahead, wide and distant in my eyes.Behind me, the crimson leaf was still crossing the water.Its finite journey still unfolding its infinite past.Nothing had changed.Or, perhaps everything had.