The current of life

The little river Rhigian rushes down the valley  and  meets the sea a short distance ahead. The sound of the waves on the shingle is already audible.

It's a pleasant walk through  the woods and out to an empty bay but it prompts mixed reflections for me ever since some years ago when a man chose to take his life by self-starvation in this valley  and I came close to finding him, either alive or dead.

I wrote about it here.

Today I crept back along the badger path to where he'd pitched his tent and waited for death to come. It was a long wait. He would have been able to hear both the babble of the stream and the swoosh of the surf.

All that's to be seen there now  are last autumn's withered leaves,  a few bright scarlet elf cups and the  new green fuses  of bluebells pushing through.  Life follows death, which is as it should be.