Remnant 1

As ever oak or stone was sound

Paulina, A Winter's Tale, Act 2, Scene 3

William Shakespeare

Formed as a rivulet, merely a trickle before that, sprung from a cleft in mossy rocks, tumbling into life on the sky mountains, the river is an artery that flows its sap through the heart of the city it began and causes to grow.

This is a city between hills that are no more than elevated ground on either bank of the river. If you look closely along the river, as it creates its own course, you will find sparse and occasional stands of the great tree that has deep roots in the geography of the city. It has further, deeper roots in two -ologies it runs through: geology and mythology.

If you follow this story you will prepare yourself to sweep along with the river and its -ologies. The landmarks and the myths will be your beacons and your guides, your compasses, sat navs, maps, gps and grid references. You will swim, cycle, walk, rest, run, amble, bolt and pause. As you might in any city on a river, for Bosnians say Grad bez riek nie grad. A city without a river is not a city. And are you all not Bosnians, war-torn, ancient, groping into a future as a grilse breasts a great river, throwing off the salty tang of its birth, droplet by droplet?

You will journey with others, some of whom are not aware that they are on the same journey as you, because they are bounded by the limits of this book. But you, you have no such limits.

Your branches reach everywhere and your twigs sprout green in the spring. You drop sere, serrated leaves when cold, damp nights prevail.

You are oak. If you find a stand of such trees in the Autumn of a year, below your feet you will crunch acorns into the loamy mulch. This is good, provided your tread is not too firm, for the pressing of acorns into humus is the means by which growth is alerted to begin. The seed reservoir of the world – the pitted, hoary nut – is the fraught guarantee that new trees will be.

Your footing of the acorns into the loam is essential. As essential as holding and reading this book. It is your passage through these pages - are they not made from the fibres of trees? - that is the act of generation and growing.

You will know. You are toothless and young; rooted and rootless; reaching and fixed; sheltering and open; resolute and frail.

You are oak, indeed. 

And you are stone. 

Bedded to rock formed by pressures on muddy plains. Aeons of time and material founded an ancient, schist shelving that rose from earth masses that stretched out of an icy north, driven from the round pate of the world by relentless sheets of glaciers moving minutely and resolutely in millennia, then sheared and clashed in plates so tectonic the heavens bellowed with their grinding, leaving rolling hills and meandering river valleys always aching towards the sea, often faltering and bound, but always managing to reach the ocean, in an eye-pleasing topography, edged by gravel and sand pits, their moraine-leavings, the ground from which you formed the mortar of your life. 

You are schist. Laced with mica and feldspar, quartz and hornblende, graphite, chlorite and talc.

You are stone.