I poured the glass of water and immediately banished the thoughts that sprang to mind. I’d just been dealing with the pond again, watching leeches swim in the shallow water at one end and wondering how the hell they got there. I didn’t put them in there. But then, I didn’t invite the frogs or the dragonflies and pondskaters either. Life finds a niche and colonises. Even though the pond had always been filled from the same tank as the drinking water I was pouring into the glass…
I recalled the world seen under the microscope when I was younger. Frankly, if I was going to get squeamish about anything other than wet worms, I would probably have done it back then. You certainly wouldn’t want to actually touch anything… anything at all. Except, that your skin is as bad… especially, I imagined, after a morning gardening. But then you wouldn’t want to wash your skin if you had a powerful enough microscope to look at water…
But I wasn’t going to think about that. Rather pointless, after all. We cannot escape the microscopic organisms that cover pretty much all of our world, one way or another. There’s nowhere to hide and we would starve or dehydrate and end up as fodder for… bacteria. Nothing is wasted, nothing really lost. Only recycled. Including the air; as one long-ago conversation would have it, the same air that had, once upon a time, passed through the digestive system of dinosaurs…
I rather like that idea. Not the dinosaur evacuations you understand, but the fact that nothing is ever truly and wholly destroyed, even though its outer form and nature may change. The interconnectedness and interdependency of life. The component parts may be separated and dispersed, but those elements still exist and will doubtless go on to form, feed or be used by something else. A process of continuous transformation, change and recycling.
Even we do that, and I don’t mean rummaging in thrift shops or transforming the leftover Christmas turkey into something less recognisable… though that counts too. No, I mean our own lives. We take what we know and carry it forward, turning it to our own particular usage, discarding some things, yet drawing at least something from them that allows us to make the decision to discard them in the first place. The component parts of our daily lives may seem to vanish into the forgotten recesses of memory, yet elements remain close to hand to be called upon at need… transformed and moulded into something new… and that is how we shape ourselves day by day.
Even so, I wasn’t drinking the water. I poured the glass into the plant pot… I could wait a few moments till the images dispersed and were themselves changed into something that resembled normality….
Sue Vincent's Daily Echo 
Thanks for the chuckle Sue, however it is soooooo true. :o)
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I don’t know what I was thinking to remind myself, Patricia 😉
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We too have a well. It draws on on the same aquifer as the river, ponds, streams. The only thing that keeps me from freaking out is knowing we are supposed to live amidst these yucky things. We’ve survived this long. So far, so good. I remind myself the perils of life in the country are no greater than in Boston. Love the cartoons!
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The real beauty is the way that all these things work togethe to create our wondrous world, isn’t it?
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Today I feel like the Dinosaurs, but maybe tomorrow I can swim to the Ark! Wonder if I would be allowed on?
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Only with a boarding pass, I imagine 😉
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Love the cartoons and can relate to not wanting to see what’s in or on anything.
Fun post. How did the leeches get there?
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I think I would rather not know, Eileen 😉
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Hilarious! Love the cartoons as well. Note to self when drinking water (which I do a lot) – don’t think!
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Never, ever, think about the water 😉
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Reblogged this on oshriradhekrishnabole.
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Jaye recently had cause to empty our water butt, and considering it was just rain water it was pretty gruesome at the bottom. Things were actually swimming around!
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Life is amazing, isn’t it? But I still wouldn’t want to have it under the microscope all the time 😉
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Sometimes it is definitely best not to think too much! 🙂
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Er.. yep 😉
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lol I’d forgotten about them dinosaurs… :p
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I thought you’d remember 😉
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It is a miracle that we manage as well as we do. It really doesn’t behoove us to look too closely! 😉 Love the cartoons, esp. the last one!
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No, seldom a good idea to look too close!
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🙂
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