Two hands lift silt from the bottom of the shallow river and rise to the surface. The sun shines into the water as the silt is carried away by the current. The hands, glowing golden against the black river bottom like a treasure, gather another layer of silt and hold it just under the surface. Slowly, the silt disappears again. Impermanence.
An idea for a drawing congealed in my imagination, a sequence of sketches illustrating the above scene. The silt dissolves into the current, and in the last frame, the hands themselves dissolve into the current. Impermanence.
I pulled out some paper and sketched two open hands. My six year old son was watching. When he saw the outstretched hands, he immediately insisted that I draw a giant heart in both of them. I drew a big, red heart. My son took the drawing and wrote in the right margin: “I am holding love.”
I left it at that.
The next day, a friend who knew nothing of my imagined river scene loaned me Rivers and Tides, a documentary about the sculptor and naturalist Andy Goldsworthy. Andy travels to different geographical regions and builds exotic creations using only the materials he finds in nature. Rocks, leaves, even ice.
Soon, his creations dissolve back into the environment from which they came. Stones collapse. Twigs are scattered by the wind. Ice melts. Leaves and flower petals are carried away by ocean tides and river currents.
Yet, despite the transience of his creations, Andy reveals a deep continuity. After building a large cone of stacked stones on the seashore, he said:
“The sea came in and the cone just disappeared and then was gone, but it was still there. A work that I had only just finished making, so my contact with the stone was still very, very strong, so I was with it down there but I still couldn’t see it.
What I have touched on this… this… this time, is I haven’t simply made this piece to be destroyed by the sea. The work has been given to the sea as a gift, and the sea has taken the work and made more of it than I could have ever hoped for.
And I think that if I can see in that ways of understanding those things that happen to us in life, that changes our lives, that causes upheaval and shock… [rubs chin thoughtfully]“
Impermanence does not mean giving up on our efforts to create something lasting. Even if we build our house on the sand, if we build it with love as a gift to the universe, the universe will come in, like the sea, and make more of it than we could have ever hoped for.
