Narcissus

I'm reading a wonderful little book that my friend Sandy gave me a few years ago. Somehow it never made it to my bedside table pile. But it's on the top now. The book is The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho. In the forward, the story of Narcissus is told, the story of the young man who knelt beside the lake to contemplate his own beauty, and so fascinated was he, that he fell into the lake and drowned one day. In The Alchemist, the goddesses of the forest come to talk to the lake, which has turned from fresh water into a lake of salty tears. The lake says "I weep for Narcissus, but I never noticed that Narcissus was beautiful. I weep because, each time he knelt beside my banks, I could see, in the depths of his eyes, my own beauty reflected." " What a lovely story", the alchemist thought.

This story came to me this weekend as we were out on the glassy smoothy bay, and I looked down into water and saw my own reflection. I am pondering the notion of what it means to have the reflection go both ways.