You’ll Never See the Tide the Same Way Again

Photograph this.

You are ranking barefoot at the side of the ocean. The air is heavy with salt, the sky decorated in bruised purples and firelight from the desperate sun. The dunes race forward, styling and breaking at your feet, before falling quietly back to the depths.

But this is not only water touching you.

Because every tide… provides memory.

Exactly the same tide that brushes against your legs today when swept over sides you'll never know. It hidden neglected cities, cooled lava since it poured from newborn volcanoes, and drowned forests that endured before people actually imagined strolling upright. It moved the ashes of fires that burned out a lot of decades ago. It's held 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 bits of the planet with it everytime it retreats — grains of mud from hills that dropped way back when, shells that once sheltered lives smaller than the usual fingernail, pieces of stone and glass utilized clean from ages of tumbling. Where do they go? To the areas we cannot see. In to trenches deeper than Everest is tall, into black canyons wherever mild never touched, into currents that range the planet like arteries.

The wave hides everything it gathers, burying the world's memories in a stop too vast for people to break.

We inform ourselves we realize it. We graph their designs, construct surfaces and harbors to struggle it, name the hours when it will rise and fall. But the tide does not care about our measurements. It has never belonged to us. It listens only to the moon.

That pale ghost in the atmosphere, distant and untouchable, pulls at the oceans every time of every day. The water Planet toward it, climbing to meet their unseen hand. And when the moon turns out, the water comes back. That quiet tug-of-war has shaped the planet for billions of years. Actually the deepest seas are tethered to anything beyond themselves.

Yet the tide is changing.

It is creeping further inland now. Glaciers are melting in to their depths, warming seas are swelling their human body, and shorelines are vanishing item by piece. Islands we when believed endless are actually removed, paid off to just titles on previous maps.

And here is the facts a lot of people do not need to handle: the tide won't end for us.

We call it disaster. The wave calls it nothing at all. It just remains, as it generally has, taking and giving, sketching and erasing. It's deleted entire continents before. It is going to do therefore again.

Would you envision the future?

The ocean moves within the towns we built. Roads vanish beneath the waves, their asphalt cracked and damaged like old bone. Towers fall into the surf, turning into reefs where fish drift through silent glass halls. Monuments crumble, broken and dispersed until they are indistinguishable from the stones of the seabed. Entire civilizations are paid down to parts, carried away by currents so solid we will never move against them.

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

It will simply remember.

Since that is what the tide does. It is the planet's memory. Every life, every hurricane, every reduction is flattened in to their depths and moved forward. The tide has seen whole sides increase and fall. It understands things number individual language could ever hold.

But the hold is not just a thief. It is a sculptor.

It delivers life to the shore. It carries nutritional elements to estuaries and marshlands wherever new animals are born. It forms the sides of the earth, removing sharp rocks in to soft stones, remaking beaches with every breath. Minus the tide, the planet's pulse might falter. Oceans could stagnate. Coastlines could wither.

Probably that's why we are drawn to it.

We visit the water's edge without always knowing why. Kiddies chase the retreating waves, joking, then shriek when it rushes straight back toward them. People remain at the shoreline all day, hypnotized by the flow, letting the noise of these lives get away. There's something eternal in the tide's air — something which calls to the portion of us that remembers wherever we came from.

Because we came from the water once.

The hold moved life onto the land. It cradled the first delicate animals that dared to examine from the shallows. And perhaps that's why we feel so little standing before it today — not because normally it takes from us, but because in certain deep, unspoken way, we realize it gave people every thing first.

Stand there good enough, and you'll begin to spot the details. The calm pull at your legs since it pulls away. The hiss of bubbles collapsing in the foam. The faint, very nearly human sigh as it exhales onto the sand.

If you listen strongly, you could hear the hold letting you know a truth:

“Nothing you realize is permanent.

But nothing is truly lost, either.”

One day, the wave may roll around the entire world like we were never here. The titles of our towns, the edges we struggled conflicts to protect, the monuments we built to overcome time — all of it is going to be swept out, melted, and carried to the deep.

And yet… there is an odd ease in that.

As the tide tells us that we are part of something bigger than ourselves. Something which doesn't require us, but supports us all the same. Every thing we do, everything we construct, every breath we get becomes element of their memory. The hold maintains it, even whenever we are gone.

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

But the next time you are at the seaside, stop. Feel the take at your feet. View the waves bring lines in the sand, then eliminate them without hesitation. Understand that the same tide handled lives you might never meet and may feel lives extended following yours.

It does not matter in the event that you forget.

The tide won't.

The tides won't ever inform us their secrets.

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