Musings: All That Glitters
January 21, 2016
All that glitters, sparkles before my eyes as I sit each day at my desk watching the Merrimack River in its constant state of passage. I am like a passenger, perpetually voyaging along the river, though the motion runs afore my eyes, it too runs through me.
There are rivulets that run within the mighty river that races downstream giving visage to a fluid landscape that flows to the ocean and then turns abruptly with the tides and flows back upstream again. How can that be, you might ask. How can a river run upstream? A river at the mouth of the ocean or sea is affected by the tides. As the tide turns on coastline, so too turns the water in the river until it reaches a certain point where the tide can no long flow against the force of the river’s natural downstream direction. There is always, always flow. Like life.
These rivulets that I see amidst the cerulean strip of icy cold water, are currents and throngs of ice floes gathered together to create platforms formed of plates of ice. These crystalline landscapes glitter before me, the planes of the ice looking like the planes and edges of a perfectly cut diamond. But, one must be weary of the plates of ice, for they are not platforms of lasting pertinence or permanence. They are as impermanent as the very substance that forms them, water.
These imperfectly formed plates of ice provide a millions shards of light the opportunity to reflect the sun in the most fascinating of ways, creating a moving picture of the essence of life. I am taken up in the vision. I am in the film. I am moved beyond the depths of my self. I am one with the river.
What fascinates me always is the landscape that is constantly changing before my eyes. Were I to endeavor to write about all that I see, I would feel compelled to sit at my desk in quiet solitude and write, just write, minute after minute, hour after hour, day after day, expounding on the sheer beauty that constantly transforms before my eyes. Oh, that I could flow along that river that so encompasses me. I am surely a part of it and it a part of me.
The gift I take from the river each day is the knowledge that nothing every stays the same. The glittering waters I see one moment is capable of changing color and direction the next. All that glitters in my purview will soon follow the sun as it moves from east to west along the river that runs past me. Adding more motion, more change, more impermanence to all that radiates about my life. I am awash in the impermanence. And I am liberated.
