dust & water

the hike is over. i am now in imst, the town i grew up in. my hometown without a physical home. still, my hometown. here there are my roots, withered, but still there. friends, stories, fragments of another time, other times. familiar places despite no family left. a cemetery with a few graves, one with my name on it: my mom.

while hiking from the lech valley to imst these past few days i found myself thinking about stone and water. the simple reason being word associations: i stayed in the steinseehütte - literally the stone-lake-hut - and soon i am going to saalfelden am steinernen meer, saalfelden at the stony sea.

and then there are the remnants of an ancient ocean visible in the stones of the tyrolean alps. fossils everywhere you look. remnants of a long-gone past. of past life. still alive today, this ocean. formed by water, pressed into stone. and always in motion. the mountains in this ocean of stone, carrying these fossils, look unchanging, like monuments to permanence.

but in fact they are changing, all the time. in flow. they are slow makers of dust, surrendering to wind, frost, snow, rain and water. the rocks, stones, gravel and dust beneath my feet are the mountains' past, present and future, all at once. particles of impermanence. on their way back to the ocean.

dust and water. also the elements of life. human clay. we are made from what has already been broken down. the minerals in our bones were once mountains. the water in our blood and cells has fallen as rain, frozen as snow and ice, trickled through streams, rushed through valleys in rivers. we are assembled from a world that existed long before us and will continue long after us.

and then we, too, go back to dust. we are the earth, for a short fragment of time, in a human form.