Water is smart.
Way smarter than us.
It worked out gravity long before Galileo, Newton & Eisenstein kicked it around.
Water is lazy in that it takes the path of least resistance.
Down its snaking, unpredictable, poetic path, there sits geometry in love with geography. It’s enough to make a skater’s knees wilt.
Man being man thinks the opposite.
We thrive on friction.
We love to challenge the notion of logic.
Anyone for cloning?
Or a seasonless year?
We build cities with lungs, but then pore by pore, we clag them up.
Often we get it so wrong.
But every once in a while we get it right.
My woodwork teacher built a concrete boat (Daddy Cooper, you shone).
Upriver, against the tide, headwind here we come.
Counter-natural is a wild way to travel.
By stomp, by pedal, by paddle, by saddle – each one egged on by bloody-minded will.
That primal urge to trace anything back to its source lies in all our genealogy boots.
Obey it just this once.
Take the path of most resistance.
Peter Kirby
