THE WONDER OF IT ALL
As we approach the end of another year amid the tumult of trying to decide where everyone stands on the issue of climate change, I came across a completely illuminating article in The New Yorker about Rachel Carson (you know, author of Silent Spring) who had written quite a bit about the land and the sea before she was ever a famous author. I was so struck by the depth of her poetry on matters near and dear to my Coastal Art Mapping-heart, that I thought I’d share three quotes. These summarize an amazing depth of feeling and should provide a guilt-free uplifting moment for anyone with a pulse. Between 1937 and 1941, she penned:
“Who knows the ocean? Neither you nor I, with our earth-bound senses, know the foam and surge of the tide that beats over the crab hiding under the seaweed of his tide-pool home; or the lilt of the long, slow swells of mid-ocean, where shoals of wandering fish prey and are preyed upon, and the dolphin breaks the waves to breathe the upper atmosphere.”
“To stand at the edge of the sea, to sense the ebb and the flow of the tides, to feel the breath of a mist moving over a great salt marsh, to watch the flight of shore birds that have swept up and down the surf lines of the continents for untold thousands of years, to see the running of the old eels and the young shad to the sea, is to have knowledge of things that are as nearly eternal as any earthly life can be.”
“In my thoughts these shores, so different in their nature and in the inhabitants they support, are made one by the unifying touch of the sea. For the differences I sense in this particular instant of time that is mine are but the differences of a moment, determined by our place in the stream of time and in the long rhythms of the sea. Once this rocky coast beneath me was a plain of sand; then the sea rose and found a new shore line. And again in some shadowy future the surf will have ground these rocks to sand and will have returned the coast to its earlier state. And so in my mind’s eye these coastal forms merge and blend in a shifting, kaleidoscopic pattern in which there is no finality, no ultimate and fixed reality—earth becoming fluid as the sea itself.”
This all touches on the very thing that drives my artwork; the ever-changing power of the where the land and water meet. It is different for everyone but it is, without a doubt, compelling and humbling. In these complex times, make sure you go visit a shoreline and re-establish your relationship with the larger world. Happy Holidays.