I’ve been getting settled in here the last few days – setting up my workspace, getting tools and materials unpacked, looking at and working with some found objects that have been stored here by my hosts and I over the last year (thanks Harvey & Judith!).
I’ve spent a lot of time walking too – getting out to the shore, walking the beaches, sitting and listening.
I’ve needed the time to slow down … to start to get myself in synch with this place, and with the tides especially.
The pace here is slower, to be sure (a welcome thing!) but the shift runs deeper. The rhythm of the day is so different; it is (and perhaps always will be) influenced by the cyclic push and pull of all that water – even if one’s daily life has little to do with the sea or tide, it’s here. Permeates everything.
I didn’t realize how much I’d missed it.
And I’ve missed the fog – it’s sultry dance across the water, the fingers that wrap themselves around the land and disappear as quickly as they touched it. Not an experience we often get on the Prairies, to be sure (though we have had more fog in the Edmonton river valley the last few years).
And all. that. water. Almost sentient at times, it seems. It’s unforgiving; beautiful and terrible in its power and capacity to overwhelm.
During the 12.4-hour tidal period, 115 billion tonnes of water flow in and out of the bay.
I find that number incomprehensible intellectually; viscerally, it makes perfect sense.
So it’s a matter for me of finding ways to express that in some way; to look at how humans have sought to understand this fact … to dig into the different ways all those tons of water have shaped the place, physically and otherwise.
The many ways the tide means.
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