Salt Marsh

This is quite a bit like the view from my mother's back yard; a path of tidal river that rises and falls with the moon, tall river rushes that rustle and sigh in the wind, concentric circles on the river's mirror surface, created by life in the water, gulls, marsh hawks, red tailed hawks, black ducks, great blue herons, white egrets, red winged black birds, mockingbirds, and my favorite, the osprey, high on their bundle of branches and grasses, every season a nesting pair who fish the river like dive bombers and rise from the water with a wriggling fish, wet scales reflecting the sun's brilliance!

I don't think there is an eco system anywhere that I love more!

Every bit of it is a feast for the senses.

The salt marsh is teaming with life and it breathes like a slow, wise animal, as evidenced by the rise and fall of the tides. So much is supported and nurtured here, it's like a little nursery, where life is infinitely tender, vulnerable, ancient and renewed. The cycles of a single day, a single hour! reveal all we need to know about living and dying, and not in a way that is prejudiced by human sentimentality.

From the microscopic water organism to the bold osprey, every sentient being has a place in the web, in Indra's salt marsh net, even me!

We humans can't help but put our stamp of approval or disapproval on all we encounter, imagining that it is not valid unless we humanly mark it.

But the truth is, the cycle of the salt marsh goes on with or without us, if we simply allow it to exist. Here, if we watch closely, we recognize the ebb and flow of our own living, connected intimately to the wind in the pines, the marsh mud compressed beneath the deer's tread, the call of the immature woodpecker for yet another meal from its parents.

So far, we humans are not doing the best job of simply allowing such spaces to exist, but I think we may be learning, if only it isn't too late to preserve such essential places. Maybe we're beginning to understand that we don't exist without the salt marsh.

I never get tired of this view. It's a luxury to simply sit and look!