A puddle

The special encounter with a live, refective index often occurs on apprehending a puddle. The glassy surface of a shallow pool of dirty water often provides the perfect medium for a refection with photographic levels of resemblance and resolution.

But a puddle is not just a refected image, it is an image cast onto the meniscus of a body of water. This body of water - accumulated at a low point of landscape, a dip in the earth, a hole - is an index in another, more material way. The water in a puddle has travelled through and over the ground - perhaps from a centimetre’s distance, perhaps for miles and miles - passing through diferent rocks, soils and stones, over roots, worms and long ago disposed of crisp packets.

As water fows over and through this ground, it is silent but not inert. The H2O molecules (and other minerals and salts contained in rainwater) react with the objects it touches. Dissolving the things it passes over and between, taking a little piece of them with it. This sampling of material from all around is, in a way, a cropping of the worldthe puddle is cutting out material chunks from the world all around it.

A puddle, then, is both a material index of time, from places in the world beyond it, and (when apprehended by me, a seeing being) a live, refective index of my being in that exact same place alongside it.