The Next Inhale
On the life held between tides
The sea’s brown soul
Washed ashore
On tidal stone.
Still life, waiting
For home
To return,
To reclaim.
Into salty flux,
And drowned hush
Of to and fro
Still, it waits
For the next inhale
Of ocean’s breath.
In clouded hours,
Unknowing
Fretless,
Unseeking,
Being
A frond of kelp belongs to the sea, but it has no means of returning itself. When the tide withdraws, the body that moments before moved with supple intelligence collapses upon the stone. Its life has not necessarily left it. The element that carried it has.
There are hours like this in a human life. The animating force recedes. What once carried us no longer does, and we find ourselves stranded inside a stillness we did not choose. We call it emptiness, paralysis or loss because we have been taught to recognise life through movement. If nothing is happening, we assume something has gone wrong.
But the sea belongs equally to arrival and withdrawal. Breath lives by emptying itself. The world is not sustained by perpetual advance, but by rhythms of presence and absence, gathering and release.
The kelp does not attempt to summon the tide. It does not improve itself for the water’s return. It lies in the clouded interval, unknowing and unseeking. Not because it possesses faith, but because being is all that remains when every other capacity has been taken from it.
Perhaps this is the deeper difficulty of waiting. Not the uncertainty of what will happen next, but the loss of the self who believed it could make something happen.
Can we remain with life when it is no longer moving in a direction we recognise?