I’m not sure what this is supposed to mean. Nothing much, probably. But if you have a spare moment (and believe me, you do have a spare moment) then find a little stream somewhere and sit beside it for a while. It might be nice.

****

You find yourself walking alone in a forest and you stop by the side of a stream to rest. You sit and lean your back up against a tree that’s branches stretch out over the water and intermingle with other trees and vines and bushes and rocks and moss as it reaches for the sky. The tree is old and her weathered bark scratches through your shirt and onto your skin in a not unpleasant way.

You are completely alone. You are deep in the forest and there is a mist rising from the stream but you feel like you could see for a thousand miles. You sense no past or future, no remorse, no ambition. No forward. No backward. Everything is motionless. There is an instant when you recognise that even your own thoughts have ceased.

But only for an instant.

For then you are aware that nothing, in fact, remains still. You cannot feel the breeze but there is enough of it to gently disturb the leaves in the trees such that they perform a dance above you and you realise that this is a once only performance and that no two such dances can ever be the same. Every tiny movement has its own reason for being and so the dance of a thousand leaves becomes so intricate before your eyes that it cannot be adequately described, much less repeated.

A single leaf becomes dislodged from its birthplace and you watch as it descends to earth. You recognise no fear or sorrow in its graceful fall, just a continuation of the dance to which there is neither beginning nor end.

Birds fly above you, stopping  occasionally to balance like gymnasts on twisted branches, looking erratically about and exchanging coded melodies. Clouds are drifting by, high above the canopy, and you watch them long enough to see their mysterious reshaping, the whisps of frozen moisture reacting to the air and the sun and the rotation of the cosmos.

The stream is only part of this eternal movement. Within it little eddies form and dissolve before your eyes and sometimes the water even stops for a moment on the edges, as if briefly contemplating a return upstream, before being sucked back out into the maelstrom and ever onward towards the ocean.

You pick up a pebble and throw it into the centre of the stream, watching as the tiny expanding waves are reshaped by the movement of the water and by the protruding rocks and sticks and reeds or just by a breath of wind, winding its way through the forest. Perhaps you see a tiny fish, startled by the movement, dart across your vision. Perhaps the falling leaf lands softly on your little wave to commence the next part of its journey. The beauty of it all brings you to tears.

You pick up another pebble and throw it, attempting to produce a replica of the event, but it is impossible, for nothing is the same. Despite the accuracy of your throw the stone arrives at a different angle. The missile itself is of a slightly different shape and weight, disturbing the water in a different manner. The clouds have conspired to subtly adjust the shade, the colours have been altered and the air has become colder, one of the sticks has been captured by the current and is gone. You realise that you are throwing a different pebble into a different stream. And that the universe has moved on.

****