"If you find the mirror of the heart dull,
the rust has not been cleared from its face."
-- Rumi
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| Rust, Old Woman Creek 4-19-14 |
"Negligence is the rust of the soul,
that corrodes through all her best resolves."
-- Owen Feltham
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| Rust (2), Old Woman Creek 4-19-14 |
"And I was standing over there,
rusting for the longest time."
-- Tin Woodsman, The Wizard of Oz
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| Rust (3), Old Woman Creek 4-19-14 |
I took my new camera out for a walk at the Old Woman Creek nature reserve yesterday.
Inside the woods, away from the wind, it felt like being inside an incubator -- warm and sheltered and gentle and protected -- teeming with new life.
Thick patches of moss were turning lush and luminous. A little spider was spinning a silky shroud to encase a winter-dried thistle. A bee worked industriously to harvest what pollen it could from the few tiny, early wildflowers pressing bravely through the humus. A pair of raccoon tracks sank deep into the mud near the creek, its shallow stream no longer locked up in ice, but flowing freely.
At every turn, it seemed, there was evidence of the old was making way for the new.
Except around the final bend of the trail.
For all the years we've been exploring Old Woman Creek, the same jumble of ancient, rusted farm implements has sat in the exact same spot, slowly and continuously disintegrating into the ground. While the rest of the woods and marsh comes alive all around it, the heap of twisted, rusting iron just decays a little further -- crumbling to bits, day after day, year after year --sharp, jagged, broken, hard, rough.
I'll resist the urge to go all deep-and-meaningful about it. You can do that on your own time. It's just that the contrast seemed particularly stark to me on this late April afternoon, when rebirth seemed to be the theme of the day.
I exited the woods with a camera full of photographs, evidence of both the old and the new, of birth and death, of what was and what might be. I liked the other photographs too, but for today, on the tender front paws of Spring, it seemed like a good thing to clear away the rust.
