Threads of vitality
I sat on a jetty, my feet casting shadows across a spring tide.
Moon, still invisible, yet like the sea, I feel her pull.
Mullet swims below in lazy eights, keeping a rhythm known, but not learned.
My gaze settles west over Brownsea.
Beyond, the Frome meets the Trent, fresh water mingles with salt.
We can trace their threads, portals between the deep sea and inland world.
Threads of vitality that infuse our islands, connecting urban to rural, land to sea, past to present.
Flowscapes do not heed county lines, conservation zones, or ownership.
Waters already carry resilience, a resistance to all we thought would last.
It reminds me of lines I have drawn in my own life, arbitrary rules I called necessary.
We shackle, abstract, dam the flow, stifle the living, reduce for measure, licence and sale.
Salmon, on her silver pilgrimage, crosses sea to spawn inland, following an ancient rhythm carried in her body.
A knowing, of how to be.
Even she, turned to research, data points, a photograph on Facebook.
Sterile. Quantified. Used.
I don’t remember how to be.
What was sacred becomes profit and loss, a ‘who’ made an ‘it’.
In that moment we separate ourselves, self – apart from wonder.Â
We are just one species, ignorant of our connection,
Denying we are of earth, with earth.
I feel the grief.
The loss of hallowed astonishment at it all.
What can nature remind me in this time of cracked earth and dry river bed?
Perhaps that we are a tiny part of something far greater than ourselves?
A living fabric of which we have always been a thread. That adversity is part of being fully alive;
that uncertainty belongs to the whole lived experience;
that complexity is not to be solved, but awed.
The parched rivers await the first drop of rain, ready to trace their old ways.
What else might they teach us as their vitality returns?
