gazing in wonder at the wikipedia page for meander
Out of all the terminological categories in the English language, geological terminology is the most intensely poetic; who could fail to be moved by metamorphism and orogenesis? There is something awesome and mythic about it.
Anyway as I was reading this article I recalled a dim, possibly inaccurate memory of Chinese mythology where four dragons transformed themselves into the four rivers that flow through China.
I've been taking walks beside the creek. The creek has "an erosion problem" as it was once described to me. I notice on one bank the creek cuts underneath the roots of the trees and threatens to collapse the bank, and on another it deposits a low, broad beach of broken stones and mud.
The recent history of humankind would mislead us to think that erosion is a linear process of degradation, but the article for meander tells me that rivers move, the loops in their channels steadily rolling along the river's length, like the slithering of a snake over a time scale of thousands of years...
A river is a kind of dragon.
