The Ocean Remembers What We Can’t

Picture this.

You're standing barefoot at the side of the ocean. The air is major with salt, the atmosphere colored in bruised purples and firelight from the dying sun. The dunes competition ahead, styling and breaking at the feet, before falling calmly back into the depths.

But this isn't just water touching you.

Because every tide… provides memory.

The same tide that brushes against your legs today after swept over sides you might never know. It buried neglected cities, cooled lava since it poured from newborn volcanoes, and drowned forests that existed before humans actually dreamed of strolling upright. It carried the ashes of shoots that burnt out one thousand years ago. It has presented the bones of sailors who vanished in to the night, their voices swallowed by wind and water.

And today it details you.

The hold takes items of the planet with it everytime it retreats — grains of mud from mountains that dropped way back when, covers that after sheltered lives smaller than the usual fingernail, pieces of rock and glass worn easy from generations of tumbling. Wherever do they go? To the areas we cannot see. In to trenches deeper than Everest is large, into dark canyons where mild has never handled, into currents that circle the world like arteries.

The hold hides everything it gathers, burying the world's memories in a stop too great for us to break.

We inform ourselves we realize it. We information its styles, build walls and harbors to battle it, title the hours when it will increase and fall. But the tide does not value our measurements. It has never belonged to us. It concentrates and then the moon.

That soft cat in the sky, distant and untouchable, pulls at the oceans every time of every day. The water Planet toward it, climbing to meet their unseen hand. And once the moon converts out, the water falls back. This quiet tug-of-war has formed the world for billions of years. Actually the deepest seas are connected to anything beyond themselves.

Yet the tide is changing.

It's creeping farther inland now. Glaciers are reduction into its depths, warming seas are swelling its human anatomy, and shorelines are vanishing piece by piece. Islands we when thought timeless happen to be removed, paid off to only titles on old maps.

And here's the facts most people do not need to face: the wave won't end for us.

We call it disaster. The tide calls it nothing at all. It really continues, since it generally has, getting and offering, sketching and erasing. It has cleared entire continents before. It will do therefore again.

Is it possible to envision the long run?

The sea moves within the cities we built. Highways vanish beneath the dunes, their asphalt cracked and broken like old bone. Systems fall in to the surf, turning in to reefs where fish move through silent glass halls. Monuments topple, smashed and scattered until they are indistinguishable from the rocks of the seabed. Whole civilizations are paid off to parts, overly enthusiastic by currents therefore strong we're able to never swim against them.

And when it occurs, the tide won't roar. It won't rage. It will not mourn.

It will just remember.

Since that's what the hold does. It's the planet's memory. Every life, every surprise, every loss is flattened in to its depths and moved forward. The wave has viewed entire worlds rise and fall. It understands points no human language could actually hold.

But the wave is not only a thief. It is a sculptor.

It provides living to the shore. It provides nutritional elements to estuaries and marshlands where new creatures are born. It shapes the ends of the planet earth, removing sharp stones into soft rocks, remaking shores with every breath. With no wave, the planet's pulse could falter. Oceans might stagnate. Coastlines could wither.

Maybe that's why we're interested in it.

We go to the water's edge without generally knowing why. Kids pursuit the retreating dunes, laughing, then shriek when it rushes back toward them. Adults stay at the shoreline all night, hypnotized by the rhythm, making the noise of these lives get away. There is something endless in the tide's air — something which calls to the portion of us that recalls wherever we came from.

Because we originated in the water once.

The tide moved living onto the land. It cradled the initial fragile animals that dared to get from the shallows. And possibly this is exactly why we feel therefore little ranking before it today — perhaps not since it can take everything from us, but because in some heavy, unspoken way, we realize it gave us every thing first.

Stay there good enough, and you'll begin to spot the details. The quiet tug at your legs as it pulls away. The hiss of bubbles crumbling in the foam. The weak, very nearly human sigh as it exhales onto the sand.

In the event that you listen tightly, you may hear the wave telling you a reality:

“Nothing you realize is permanent.

But nothing is actually lost, either.”

1 day, the hold may roll around the planet as though we were never here. The titles of our cities, the edges we struggled conflicts to guard, the monuments we built to outlast time — everything will soon be swept away, softened, and moved into the deep.

And yet… there's a strange ease in that.

As the hold tells us that we are part of anything larger than ourselves. A thing that does not need people, but supports people the same. Everything we do, everything we build, every breath we take becomes part of their memory. The tide keeps it, actually once we are gone.

You'll never know all so it carries. None people will.

But the next occasion you're at the seaside, stop. Feel the pull at your feet. View the waves draw lines in the sand, then eliminate them without hesitation. Understand that exactly the same hold handled lives you'll never match and may touch lives long following yours.

It doesn't matter if you forget.

The tide won't.

The tides won't ever tell us their secrets.

But if you are quiet enough, you might experience them in your bones.