People Are Like Seaweed

Lilypads and river weeds at Long Island lock station… More postscripted below

We’re mostly made of water, and available in infinite varieties, with a tendency to tangle.

We mostly grow in groups; some multiply, some die, some drift and reroot elsewhere. The outliers converge, if not in bays, with communication through the fish and the vibrations in the water. Some do grow best in solitary, whether as the bit of green in a situated prism, or a floating facet passing through the continuum of a rainbow.

We cross each other’s nets, bringing life from other oceans. We carry the flotsam from the shallows into the sea, and salt the deltas as we struggle upstream.

We pass each other in the current, sometimes joining or twining or knotting, sometimes weaving through the spaces between leaves without feeling each other, sometimes waving from a distance.

Some grow in shallow water, with flowers drinking in the sunlight and dressing up for butterflies. Some root deep, through rocks and coral older than memory. Gardens for ducks, shelter for fish, playgrounds for the jellies and octopus… all part of overlapping and concentric patterns.

Also like weeds, we proliferate unhealthily in contexts that both cause and result from ecodamage, shifting climate zones, increasing temperatures.

Weeds tangle up propellers, slowing boats and wrecking motors. But the motors don’t belong; we — including me — justify them on the basis of self-interest, with criteria not relevant to the whole. Somehow we bought the story that we can continue navigating the same channels regardless of the dams, that life can breathe enough to grow in garbage reservoirs, that boats with holes can float,

But as some wise person out there meme-ified, weeds are only plants we don’t understand yet because they grow outside the box (or pool).

The weeds can run amok and wreck the boats and choke the rivers, or they can be part of flourishing reefs and inlets.

There’s one big difference between people and seaweed, though. The seaweed can’t decide how it will grow.

With hope and determination,

Ann

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River weeds I’ve met recently, and waterlilies photographed by Sarah Imrisek during our trip up the Rideau… You can find more of Sarah’s photography and artwork at instagram.com/cymatiste

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