Nothing

This week's Sunday Creative prompt was "Nothing." How to capture nothing? Oh my head. I wanted to find a way to make "nothing" a positive, full of something while being nothing. It's taken me awhile to come up with a picture I feel captures "nothing" in a hopeful, powerful light; but I remembered this picture I took a few weeks ago in Santa Cruz, and realized it had to be my Sunday Creative picture:

The roots of this tree, hovering at the edge of the cliff, are clinging to nothing. Who knows how long it has been there, growing those amazing tendrils down into the ground. One thing is certain, it won't be there much longer. Even with those tenacious roots, nothing is going to be able to keep that tree from toppling over the edge of the beach cliff as the soil below it erodes away. In one sense, that makes me sad--I thought, "how sad to have lived all that time, grown and developed such extensive roots, only to slide off the side of a cliff into oblivion." But then I realized that on the beach, the tree will be a home for sandpipers or a lookout perch for gulls. When it slides out to sea, it will be a play ground for the otters and sea lions that hang out at this beach. So my initial lament of "It was all for nothing," turns out not to be true after all. And there's nothing more hopeful than finding "something" worthwhile in "nothing."