"The river is everywhere"

"The river is everywhere."

" “Have you also learned that secret from the river; that there is no such thing as time?" That the river is everywhere at the same time, at the source and at the mouth, at the waterfall, at the ferry, at the current, in the ocean and in the mountains, everywhere and that the present only exists for it, not the shadow of the past nor the shadow of the future.”  

Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha 

 

The Tarras River is in flood, its peat-stained thundering waters in a great hurry to leave this gathering place. Oozing off the hill from every sphagnum pore, streams scramble down around the foot of each hill and it is here they learn to smash deep mahogany reds into milky tea whites as they rush to to forsake the wild emptiness of the moor.

Mesmerised by the crashing waters I stare into the endless tumbling,  strangely soothed by the myriad variation of wave-forms, patterns and hues. The many tongues of the river babble endlessly, they do so with one voice and with hundreds, I am lost in it all and time becomes irrelevant.