Sheens

I walked along a shoreline looking at the rocks that have been tumbling for ages.  Embedded within them were various pieces of wood, some driven so deeply into the high tide line it seemed as if they had grown there. Some, it seemed, had actually grown there, maybe before the tides carried the rocks up around them, back before the land was claimed by the sea's reach.  Trunks left standing dead, and isn't it great, I thought, that they have maintained their place even in their last years of existence, maybe not dead from a perspective that there is an ongoing existence, flow and exchange of physical stuff on this earth...


And then there was the driftwood.  There was one piece of birch that must have floated in on the last storm's seas.  I saw it from a distance - the bark was shimmering in the late afternoon's glow.  I didn't remember seeing that sort of birch around in the area, but there is, supposedly, a prevalence of birch, white birch, along the shorelines of Nova Scotia.

I brought the piece back with me, back to my own shoreline of existence, flow and exchange.  To eplore into a piece of wood to effect it into a different form is not much different from time transforming a tree upon a shoreline?

We reside on so many edges, within so many lees, exposed stretches of openness, surrounded by a constant interchange of materiality, eperiencing so many levels of sheen of surfaces.  To "know" or to move within are different aspects of the same thing?