I once thought that a stream bed was unmovable: if water traveled a path, there it would lie eternally. Not so I have learned–not so perhaps. The other day this very old guy I know and like very much pointed into a shallow woods where no stream flowed or had appeared to have flowed in a long time, and he said to me, “When I was maybe 10, there was a creek that flowed in there. With a line and hook I could have caught a trout on any afternoon. The water was so cool and fresh–it tasted so good on a hot afternoon” Streams, apparently, make poor boundaries.
Boundaries rise up and disappear. Nothing seems permanent in the larger picture. Places hold our imagination, but little else. There is a picture of a boundary gone–barbed wire just grown into a tree. Where cattle once grazed, maples fall. Where streams once flowed, a lick of sand and pebble trails off.
October 7, 2007 at 8:23 pm
This planet is constantly shifting,turning,changing.
October 8, 2007 at 8:00 am
…And we with it. I think about that a lot. The whole science of global warming raises the question of human impact. An acquaintance, who was teaching at the U of Penn expressed to me his skepticism of the position that the warming of the planet was caused by industrial emissions. He held that the warming of the planet was a natural cycle of heating and cooling, and that the most recent signs were just a return to a norm from one of the most cool periods in the planet’s history. I don’t have the training to agree or disagree, but his position does suggest how small we really are in the scheme of it all. It also puts into perspective our great conflicts and how really petty they become when we consider our whole survival as a species. Poor us! Our boundaries don’t mean nothing to a meteor.