Treading Water.

The art and skill of Walking On Water has been mythologized and reversed-anthropomorphosized since it was first observed by sinking people, noticing and dearly coveting the abilities of so many other of God’s creatures to go about their business despite the fact that they were in over their heads.

The numbers of the so enabled are beyond my counting; among them are fowl in protracted take-offs, and more numerously and abundantly, insects of varied forms.

Now when water birds do The Jesus, they tend to explode in an orgy of flapping feathers and a flurry of flying feet. And frankly, to Human observers, that looks like a LOT of work, especially in light of the slimness of the chance that we could ever beat feet and fly.

But insects…

Ah, the idyllic life of the water bug, flitting, pausing, posing, defying gravity with a deft command of surface tension, with agile agita, the staccato dance and Dervish-spinning of whirligigs and water beetles, and the gentle glide of the Water Strider, a stick-slender Hans Brinker on an unfrozen mission, both hunting and hunted, nearly invisible but for its shadow:

The Strider’s Light is deflected, channeled around the slim contours of its diminutive form, bent by its being, funneled to its feet and mirrored in the menisci where adhesion battles cohesion battles a phenomenon we’ve heard of but can’t quite comprehend, yet somehow know is true.

Oh, that we too could attain that lightness, rise to the surface and skate away,

skate away,

to Freedom!