Flux is the word that comes to mind as one saunters alongside water flowing down the high mountains, in part envious of its nonchalant frolic down the slope as one huffs and puffs in the opposite direction, in part grateful for the perpetuity of this motion that offers small encouragements and a quietude in its myriad aural expressions…
For everything around seems rather sluggish and laboured save for flashes of mammalian or avifaunal activity – the cryosphere in the distance tempting the fatalist with its brooding silence… the glacier groaning and grinding, consumed by its desire to churn everything into silt… the moraines glum, their inertness broken time and again by a rebel rock making a beeline for its own personal real estate in the meadows somewhere… the vegetation always hanging on to dear life, trying to go unnoticed lest ‘tis nicked off by a breeze or razed to the root by a herbivore… flowing water seems innocent and playful in such a context, frolicking at the elation of escaping the cold clutches of rock and ice at last…
There’s the wind and the clouds, of course, but their flux is fickle, whimsical and transient… unlike water on the ground that suffuses its properties in a subtle manner, they have the tendency to be overbearing, chiding landscapes into swaying to their tune or just letting loose upon them… there is flux everywhere, if one views it objectively, but most of it too swift or too slow for the human eye to discern… flowing water hits the sweet spot, a harbinger of life, comforting as it roars or burbles or thunders or trickles down, mesmerized by the song of gravity and the lore of an infinite expanse that is the ocean…
Sometimes it perturbs, this flux, instigated by its glacial progenitors irked by the sun or a bunch of clouds out on a purposeful downpour… raging, swirling torrents sending shivers down the very spine that swoons over its meanders in mellower times… ‘tis just a phase though, for such anger is fleeting, and one knows it is a matter of time before all becomes jovial again…
Musing on flowing water, hiking in the Himalaya
