What Remains

A fallen tree lies by the sea in Vancouver. It was once very large. Piece by piece it has been cut away, and what remains is a fragment, marked by deep lines where people tried to split it through the middle. It resisted.

I found it not long after arriving in Canada. Like the tree, I had been uprooted. For months I stayed beside it. I talked to it, sat on it, walked across it, drank coffee with it in the rain. Two uprooted things, side by side by the water. It judged nothing: not the sea that wore it down, not the hands that cut it, not me. It gave me a calm I had not expected to find, and a friendship at the start of a new life.

These photographs show what I saw in it: its flow, its colour, its patience. They do not show the cuts. That was a choice, and it is also the point. What we frame, and what we leave out, is how we decide what a thing is.

What would you have seen if the cuts were here?