The river is completely back to normal. All of the trees that were flooded are now far from the water’s edge. The little islands in the river are back now.
There’s some magnificent river gums on this river. Today, while I was taking photos of bark, I put my hand on the huge old tree’s trunk. I got a sense of how there’s some things in this world that are constant, like the tree, and other things that are transient. The things this tree must have seen coming and going, maybe even horse and carts a hundred years ago. How many floods? Countless floods would have come and gone. And now me, this person that comes and sits underneath it sometimes and talks into this strange device.
I wonder if the tree has seen a difference in people over the years, as our lives got faster and the world changed. Now we have everything at our fingertips and so much more pressure. I imagine that when this tree was young, there would have been people coming to the edge of the river to sit, to fish, and just spend time. I imagine life was so much slower back then.
I want to stop being ‘transient’ in my own life. I want my presence, like the presence of this tree, to become more like the ‘constant’ that other things come and go around.
— Catherine