Heroes Not Zombies

This is one of my favourite photos of water tumbling over rocks as it heads down a Scottish hillside.

What I really like about it is the shape of the rocks – they look smooth, they look sculpted, they look “malleable”. In fact they seem to have a softness you wouldn’t expect in a rock.

I know it will have taken many, many years for the water to shape these rocks this way. That’s a kind of Earth-art, where Nature creates beautiful shapes, little by little, day by day, year by year, century by century.

But the other thing that appeals to me is the shape of the flowing water. It doesn’t just flow any which way. I flows over and around the edges of the rocks. In fact, it almost looks like this is a great rocky mouth, overflowing with water!

In other words, you can see from this single, still, image, that this is a dynamic inter-connected, process here. The rock and the water are in a relationship. Neither would be the same without the other. Both have their form and behaviour shaped by the relationship itself.

That seems a deep and eternal truth to me – there is nothing in this world which exists in isolation – everything and everybody is constantly changing, constantly being shaped, by a vast, complex web of energies and influences.

We are not alone.