“Sediment & Muck”

By Ron Stultz

19 April 2005

He sees it now, the flow, the “river”, that is his life.  Most times he cannot, but for a moment, he is not of it but rather beside it and he is amazed by what he can see and feel.   

He, what is defined to be him, is the leading edge of a newly developing flow, “river”, making its way down to the sea where he will become lost as the leading edge disappears in union with the sea but he can see now, how the river behind him will remain in space and time. 

Although he cannot see it from where he is now, he knows, can feel, his beginnings high up, springing from the ground, the earth, the mother earth and 4 billion years of DNA evolution.  No more than a DNA dominated trickle at first of poor eye sighted homo sapien, he began his leading edge journey down over “tree roots” and around “rocks”, making a channel, a grove, a stream bed, a life. The path totally unpredictable at first as the flow took the path of least resistance to the environment, it surroundings.  God shaping the flow, chaos as his hands. 

For a long time, the trickle was no more than a trickle although a constant one but then, over time, experiences like falling rain, begin to swell the trickle into a stream and the path of least resistance, the target of other flows, experiences, add to the stream in both force and depth and he always on the leading edge.  

At some point, now distant in the past and way upstream from where he is now, he knows he hit a large emotional boulder, which became his first memory, eddy in the flow and some of those early memories are with him now, on the leading edge.  Others have dissolved back into the current that is pushing forward.  But this first memory and other early memories, gave him an awareness of himself.  No, then he did not understand that he was on the leading edge and would always be on the leading edge of something moving through space and time but he knew that he had a life, some measure of time. 

The leading edge, him, has become full of emotional sediment from cutting through the time and space of experiences.  At times, he has been able to drop some of his load when he could broaden out but as he looks now, he sees that along the path that is his life, there are sections of the flow where the bottom is full of muck from too much deposited there.  He knows this, as occasionally as he continues to cut on down as the leading edge, he will come to something, which makes he wade into himself at a muck point and his mind becomes cloudy and he confused.  He does not like it there.  He prefers to stay on the clean cutting edge of the flow, to stay him and not part of this past, the flow behind him. 

At other times, the channel that has become the life trailing behind him has a solid bottom and the flow is clear and clean and he is proud of that.  Maybe something to be shared or enjoyed by others.  At a minimum, not a pollution of God’s gift. 

He cannot see how far it is until he reaches the sea but more and more each day, he can feel, smell, sense, the sea and he knows he must not fear joining it but rather embrace it.  Yes, the “he” of the leading edge will be gone but the flow will continue.