Today my winter swim was longer than it should have been, and the cold has settled deep into muscle and bone.It is familiar.

As I walk up the path, the stream falls in torrents beside it; I wonder about life and a recurrent echo in my thoughts: the many and the one.

We gather the many into one and call it whole.Yet something seems to escape our gathering.I watch the stream moving between its banks.The swirl of water takes the shape of the land, while the land, over time, yields to the water.Stones interrupt its passage, smoothed by the long touch of time, gathering little whirlpools in their wake.Each movement belongs to the stream, though the stream itself is never quite where I imagine it to be.

I wonder where its wholeness resides.

In the clear cold water, perhaps, or in the mossy green banks that give it form?In the countless movements that arise, cascade and disappear, each carrying something of the others?

The closer I look, the more difficult it becomes to hold the stream together as a single thing.Yet it is here before me, unmistakably a stream.

I sense that we cannot step outside the whole to see it whole, for even our seeing belongs to its becoming.

Perhaps there is something in this illusive tension, in the way the many gather into one while continually exceeding what that one can hold.

Even as I watch, the stream is becoming other than it was.And still, I recognise it.

Perhaps we all are like this.