Stream of Thought
Joel Pomerantz
This essay was published in the Fall 2002 issue of the Glen Helen Ecology Institute Newsletter.
| see tear sheet | reactions • suggestions • comments |
I sit on a bridge, a small wooden plank bridge, my feet suspending my constricting city shoes over a tiny brook. The glen is full of sounds, each swallowing the others in rotating crescendos of burbles, chirps, caws and hums.
There is an adolescent but solid tree leaning out from the bank, where its branching roots tiptoe into the mud above a pool big enough to catch two or three of the tree's compound leaves.
One end of the pool sits quietly against the bank with wiggling reflections from the filtered and moistened sun. The other end is a pass-through: water trickles in; water trickles out. Narrow and wiggling channels, like waterslides for a salamander, keep the pool from stagnation while not roiling its surface enough to flush away one tiny brown leaflet.
The leaflet is a raft against the water's sweetly dimpled, yet tightly unyielding surface tension. Against the other bank, less than a meter distant, the water's surface is shredded into large dispersing bubbles by a raging torrent that one of my shoes could soggily dam to a halt, if I were to wedge it into the notch of the limestone channel. But the leaf feels only a wavering tug, more drawn by the slight stickiness of one sipping little tree root its stem rests alongside.
As I sit here, in the company of a patient green spider who tends her tidy and untrammeled morning web, I think of the delicate balance of flow and tension, movement and resistance, in the water, in the web, in the world.
An orchard spider.
| see tear sheet | reactions • suggestions • comments |