The Looming Tide

There's a certain moodiness you find in nature. A fundamental force that rumbles just beyond the edges of your perception waiting to be unleashed. It's constrained only by the powers cosmic, ready to turn at any minute; a push/pull of the laws we've ascribed to nature and her own volition.

We're good at describing the gathering storm clouds, the darkening skies, the light mists of rain that slowly turn to downpours. We've devoted vast amounts of compute resources to our predictive capabilities, our models of what will yet to be, and even so, with very little variance, we're often wrong to the outcome. For all that we think we know, we're in turn reminded of how truly vast nature is and how little we know of it.

Spending time at the ocean's edge, at the front or back end of any storm, will set you to rights. There's a delicious fury to the waves pounding against the rock shores, as if the wolf is banging on the pig's house of brick. It's a story repeated with some frequency and, I wonder if it's truly allegorical to what we find in nature?

The light is always challenged in these moments to appear in meaningful ways. Should it highlight the placid calm between the waves or should it highlight the ever-lightening skies tinged in the faintest pinks and blues? The waves are capped in white, foaming at the mouth with the anticipation of their undulations being fulfilled against the slicked rocks of shore, their talons reaching, grabbing, pulling anything that dares to come near back into the looming maw of the incoming tides.

I'm overwhelmed by these scenes what with their incredibly complex mechanisms, gyrations, and stories that they tell. I'd like to believe in the magical appearance of ghost fishing boats, draped in seaweed, miraculously intact but with a looming and dark presence. I'd like to imagine the driftwood and the stories of thousands of miles at the behest of untamed currents and winds, winding its way from tropical to arctic waters to end up carved on a human's mantle somewhere or tossed into a castaway's fire. The ocean is an odyssey all of its own and we are but supplicants to its story.

These moments in the Faroes drive home the point, again and again, of connection, of groundedness. Nothing exists without planning or purpose because, should there be any deviation, nature herself will call down the fire and fury of storm, wind, rain, and sea and wipe it completely from existence. As you see at the very bottom edges, humanity has tried to prevent encroachment and yet, in the face of this relentless tide, has fared poorly.

In a few decades, where I once stood will be gone, consumed by the rising tides of our mistakes and misuse. It will be given back to the sea, worse for the wear, because we failed to understand our stewardship, our sacred obligation to nature and her wiles. You and I will have changed the course of our planet, leading from an age of beneficence to another of obeisance and, given what I've learned from our reckless leaders, it will be at the end of a very short leash. We tout our exponential developments in the last few centuries yet fail to understand the incredible toll they've taken on the people and resources in kind.

I can only ask for you to be good shepherds and stewards of your own path. I've said it before but we're called to be caretakers; of people, of places, of moments that lead to our sustaining. What good is any of this if we wipe away our presence on this earth for the sake of some sort of cosmic glory? Chasing a dream of extraterrestrial success is meaningless if the very ground you walk on is enveloped in the morass of your poor decisions.

Dear souls, be good caretakers of what you're being granted. Walk softly on the paths that nature has provided us, aware of the looming dark. Be guardians and guides to those who are unaware, teachers to those who are untaught, challengers to those who seek to sow discord and doubt, and above all else, through your love and care, seek to preserve that which is so easily lost.

May it ever be so.

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