This post is the second of the Small Noticings series, started here. 

At first, I found it hard to notice nature here at the cabin. Everything is still. The water is a dark, pure mass. But at lunch we take the paddleboat into a glassy lake, and watch the runners slicing open the water's surface.

We pull into the dock, and a boreal chorus frog (I look up later) sits so still I put my camera almost to his back and he doesn't take a breath. I touch his thigh and he still holds. This great presence surprises me. And I notice the tiniest flake of bright red, one millionth the size of the frog, a clover mite, a flake of salt, running beside him. I have traveled into a world of miniatures.

Travelers

Rain solid and knocking
stops abrupt, as if a traveler
wearied at the door now slept,
and here we float along, paddling
our little boat on water slit only
by surface bugs who zip a seam
that opens endlessly and we pass
into a blue between clouds,
the place which we have
always traveled toward,
our greeter one lake frog
aware so fully of us being here
he doesn't need to look our way
to welcome us.