Trenches

At one end of the beach this morning there were two strangers and at the other a swamp had formed because the river was blocked by a bank of rocks and sand. I walked toward and past the strangers who were seemingly unfriendly to my little cove of silence and I noticed I’d been followed by the lady stranger so I made my way back to the beach and let her have my cove. 

I got to the swamp and looked at it with its scum and goose poop swirling around and decided I’d dig some trenches through the blockage to drain and maybe find some treasures beneath. So I dug and the swamp followed. I watched as my trenches came to life emptieing into the lake. Over time I saw that some trenches closed and others became bigger, the flow changed direction, little islands formed in some places and a big sandbar formed extending into the lake. 

I knew that I didn’t NEED to create this path for the water and that nature would change it on its own but I wanted it to look different now. I thought about how no matter how humans attempt to change an environment nature will always work around it or reclaim it completely and then I thought god damn that’s just like my kids!

I, like most parents I’m sure, work really hard to try to put them on the right path and share with them the lessons I’ve learned along the way. I try to tell them to learn from the mistakes I’ve already made so they don’t have to repeat those same ones. Then I realized it’s just like this swamp, I can show them the path, hell I can even DIG them a trench but then the rest is up to them. I cannot control what choices they make any more than I could control the river that formed from my trench. That’s the hardest part of the whole thing. We can only help guide others, the shapes and directions their paths take is their own journey.