succession

We classify waterways by obstruction.

I am not speaking of size or speed or beginnings or ends.

I am thinking of the calculation of the value of water.

Where is this stream?

Who does it matter to?

What lives within it?

When I see clear water, not a branch in sight I think-

Poison.

Ponds where salt or chemicals or temperature have stripped life.

Or streams whose speed is so swift and cold that all that would live within it are carried away, helpless.

It is the water with coated rocks, branches haphazardly fixed in murky pools that support the fragile chain of existence.

Life is not pretty.

It is a muddy burst of escaping minnows.

It is a rotting branch releasing itself back to the shoots below.

Death is always the base support of life

If you would like to follow more winding streams, I have also written a fantasy novel, The Guests of Honor. It is available here.

As the snow melts, the cannibals become visible.

They sit, deceptively fragile, on the surfaces of their forefathers, slowly molding themselves to the greater bodies of times long past.

I can spend hours staring at rotting stumps.

I love watching those tiny saplings, seeded from the remaining trees, struggle to gain purchase on their dead kin.

This is no horror story.

This is a sharing, a passage of life and strength from the old to the new.

My words transit on the page, drawing from stories and memories, things passed and precious.

Neither I nor the saplings can become exactly as the great ones who stood before us.

But we can plant our roots, firmly, clearly in the strength of the past.

Our arms reaching upwards to a new and unknown space.

The emerging future

In between staring at stumps and saplings, I have also written a fantasy novel, The Guests of Honor. It is available here.

Cat Amesbury