How can it be that mounds of rock, moss-shawled and meadow-crowned, exist in such abundance along this coast waiting, quite simply, to be lounged upon by a creature set upon the slow undoing of its own pristine forest view?

The Douglas fir does not apologize for standing. The arbutus peels its red skin into the wind and asks nothing of the cliff that holds it. Only I arrive with a question, and a question is already a kind of taking.

How can it be that so many animals, whose roles are to serve in the creation of function, the mite, the fungus, the unremarkable beetle, end up trumping the beauty of creatures so capable as us in creativity and imagination? Yet, their work holds, as ours weathers.

How can it be that we find ourselves in a world of so many materials, yet none we shape hold a candle to what exists innately from the beginning of this chaos?

All the order we fabricate does little but pale; even in the palest of cloudy April afternoons, on a bluff above a marsh in Nanaimo, where the road runs on the other side of the hill and pretends, for my sake, not to be there.