High on a cold mountaintop, a single drop of water was born from a melting patch of snow. She was small and clear and round, and she trembled on the edge of a gray stone, not knowing where to go. "Where do I belong?" she wondered. Then a tiny voice inside her seemed to answer: Down. Follow the slope. The sea is waiting. She had never heard of the sea, but the word filled her with a strange and happy longing.
So the little drop let go of the stone and began to roll downhill.
At first she was alone. But soon she met another drop, and another, and another, all rolling down the mountain together. They joined hands and became a trickle. The trickle met more water and became a stream, dancing over pebbles, leaping down little falls, chattering and laughing as it went. "We're going to the sea!" the water sang, though none of them had seen it yet.
Down through the high green meadows the stream ran, cold and quick and bright.
Lower down, the stream met other streams, and together they grew into a wide, slow river. Now the water moved with a deep and patient strength, carrying leaves and boats and the reflections of clouds. It wound past villages and under bridges, through forests and fields, in no hurry at all, for it knew now that it would reach the sea in time.
Children waved from the banks. Fish swam in its cool green deeps. And still the river flowed on, gathering everything it passed into its long journey down.
And then, one bright morning, the little drop — now part of the great wide river — tasted something new on the air: salt, and wind, and an endless blue space opening ahead. The river widened, and widened, and slowed, and at last it poured out into the sea.
Oh, the sea! It was bigger than every dream the little drop had dreamed on the mountaintop — wide enough to hold the whole sky, deep enough to hold a million journeys just like hers.
The little drop floated happily in the warm salt water, her long journey done. But the story did not end there. For the sun reached down with warm gold fingers and lifted her up, light as a feather, into the sky. She became part of a cloud, drifting back over the land — back toward the mountains, where one cold morning she would fall again as snow, and begin the whole long journey anew.
"Nothing in nature is ever truly lost," the old river would murmur. "It only travels, round and round, forever."
And so the water goes, from mountain to sea to sky and back, the oldest journey in the world, still flowing on today.