The Language of Waterfalls

It takes a while to learn the language of waterfalls, because each speaks a slightly different dialect, but if you go to the same waterfall again and again, you’ll learn to hear its voice. At first, you’ll find it tucked between maidenhair ferns, as the droplets fall, and then you’ll pick it out of the dull thud of water absorbed into moss, and the quiet drip as they roll off the shoulders of saxifrages, down crevices into dark volcanic stone, and into drifts of cow parsnip tucked along the edges. And then, at last, you’ll hear it in the wind, the waterfall’s own wind, which blows your hair back as you step toward it, this waterfall which has always been alive, and you hear it call out in greeting, in the same voice as stars, and rivers, and mountains; the voice of old beings, whose lives are too long for us to imagine.