What the Tide Knows Will Shake You

Photograph this.

You're position barefoot at the edge of the ocean. The air is large with salt, the sky colored in bruised purples and firelight from the dying sun. The dunes battle forward, curling and breaking at the feet, before falling calmly back in the depths.

But that is not only water pressing you.

Since every tide… carries memory.

The exact same hold that brushes against your ankles today after taken around worlds you might never know. It buried neglected cities, cooled lava because it built from newborn volcanoes, and drowned forests that existed before humans actually imagined walking upright. It moved the ashes of fires that burnt out a lot of years ago. It has presented the bones of sailors who vanished into the night, their comments swallowed by wind and water.

And now it details you.

The wave takes items of the planet with it each time it retreats — grains of mud from hills that dropped long ago, covers that when sheltered lives smaller when compared to a fingernail, pieces of stone and glass utilized smooth from generations of tumbling. Wherever do they're going? To the places we can not see. In to trenches deeper than Everest is tall, into black canyons where light never touched, in to currents that range the world like arteries.

The tide covers every thing it collects, burying the world's thoughts in a stop too great for us to break.

We tell ourselves we understand it. We information their styles, construct surfaces and harbors to struggle it, title the hours when it will increase and fall. Nevertheless the wave doesn't care about our measurements. It has never belonged to us. It listens and then the moon.

That soft cat in the air, distant and untouchable, brings at the oceans every moment of each day. The water Planet toward it, rising to meet its unseen hand. And once the moon converts away, the water falls back. This silent tug-of-war has formed the planet for billions of years. Also the deepest seas are tethered to anything beyond themselves.

The tide is changing.

It's creeping farther inland now. Glaciers are reduction in to its depths, heating seas are swelling its human body, and shorelines are vanishing item by piece. Islands we once thought timeless already are removed, reduced to nothing but names on old maps.

And here's the facts many people don't want to face: the tide won't stop for us.

We contact it disaster. The tide calls it nothing at all. It simply remains, because it generally has, taking and providing, sculpting and erasing. It has cleared entire continents before. It can do so again.

Can you imagine the near future?

The sea sheets within the cities we built. Streets vanish under the dunes, their asphalt damaged and damaged like old bone. Systems fall in to the search, turning in to reefs wherever fish drift through silent glass halls. Monuments crumble, smashed and spread until they're indistinguishable from the rocks of the seabed. Entire civilizations are paid off to fragments, overly enthusiastic by currents therefore solid we will never swim against them.

And when it occurs, the wave won't roar. It won't rage. It won't mourn.

It will simply remember.

Since that is what the tide does. It's the planet's memory. Every living, every storm, every reduction is flattened in to its depths and carried forward. The wave has viewed entire worlds increase and fall. It understands things number individual language could actually hold.

Nevertheless the hold is not really a thief. It is a sculptor.

It offers living to the shore. It holds nutrients to estuaries and marshlands where new animals are born. It forms the edges of the earth, smoothing sharp stones into delicate rocks, remaking beaches with every breath. With no tide, the planet's pulse would falter. Oceans could stagnate. Coastlines could wither.

Maybe this is exactly why we're drawn to it.

We visit the water's edge without always understanding why. Kids pursuit the retreating waves, laughing, then shriek when it rushes right back toward them. Adults sit at the shoreline all day, hypnotized by the flow, letting the noise of their lives get away. There is anything endless in the tide's air — something which calls to the part people that remembers wherever we came from.

Because we originated from the water once.

The wave moved life onto the land. It cradled the very first delicate creatures that dared to examine from the shallows. And perhaps this is exactly why we sense so small standing before it today — perhaps not since it will take sets from people, but since in some strong, unspoken way, we realize it gave people everything first.

Stay there long enough, and you'll begin to spot the details. The calm tug at your legs as it draws away. The hiss of pockets collapsing in the foam. The weak, almost individual sigh as it exhales onto the sand.

If you hear tightly, you may hear the hold suggesting a reality:

“Nothing you realize is permanent.

But nothing is actually lost, either.”

One day, the tide can move over the entire world as though we were never here. The names of our towns, the edges we struggled wars to safeguard, the monuments we developed to outlive time — all of it will be swept away, softened, and moved to the deep.

And yet… there is an odd comfort in that.

Since the wave reminds people that we are element of something bigger than ourselves. Something which doesn't require people, but supports people the same. Every thing we do, every thing we build, every air we take becomes section of its memory. The wave maintains it, even whenever we are gone.

You'll never know all that it carries. Nothing people will.

But the next time you're at the seaside, stop. Have the pull at your feet. View the waves draw lines in the sand, then eliminate them without hesitation. Remember that the same tide moved lives you may never meet and can feel lives long following yours.

It does not subject in the event that you forget.

The wave won't.

The tides will never tell us their secrets.

But when you're quiet enough, you could sense them in your bones.