A Trill in the River

When I was a boy, we had a creek behind our house that had some stone cascades in it. I used to walk down with my dog and watch the water shooting across the stones, a cool place to spend hot summer days like these. You'd sit and watch the water, and watching it you would notice persistent shapes -- trills, you might call them -- that leapt up and curled as the water pressed against the stones just-so in its rush. 

Imagine that scene, or whatever version of it you grew up with yourself. Watching water flow over stones is almost universal among humanity. Imagine watching such a trill, and then you hear a rock upriver shift in the flow. This changes the pattern of the river ever-so-slightly, but the trill you were admiring for its beauty and perfect curves suddenly vanishes and can never be restored by anything you can do. 

Such, I realize tonight, is the human condition. We are like the trills in the river. All the parts of us that were us are already long gone down the flow. All the parts that are us are just coming to be us, will be part of us very briefly and will then flow on accordingly. And someday, when something in the world changes just-so, the trill itself will vanish and no human effort will be able to bring us back.

But what is it to love a trill? What is it to mourn one? What reality did it ever really have? It was just a shape of moving water.