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Xigekey xige 3 months agoImage this.
You're position barefoot at the side of the ocean. The air is large with salt, the sky decorated in bruised purples and firelight from the dying sun. The waves battle forward, styling and breaking at the feet, before sliding quietly back in the depths.
But this isn't just water touching you.
Since every tide… holds memory.
The exact same wave that brushes against your ankles tonight once taken over worlds you'll never know. It hidden forgotten cities, cooled lava because it poured from newborn volcanoes, and drowned forests that endured before humans actually imagined walking upright. It moved the ashes of shoots that burnt out a thousand decades ago. It's held the bones of sailors who faded in to the night, their sounds swallowed by wind and water.
And today it touches you.
The hold takes items of the planet with it each time it retreats — cereals of sand from hills that dropped way back when, shells that after sheltered lives smaller than the usual fingernail, pieces of rock and glass used clean from generations of tumbling. Wherever do they go? To the areas we can not see. In to trenches deeper than Everest is large, into black canyons where gentle hasn't touched, in to currents that group the planet like arteries.
The wave covers everything it gathers, burying the world's memories in a silence also large for all of us to break.
We inform ourselves we realize it. We graph its styles, construct surfaces and harbors to fight it, name the hours when it'll increase and fall. However the wave does not care about our measurements. It has never belonged to us. It listens and then the moon.
That soft cat in the atmosphere, distant and untouchable, pulls at the oceans every time of each and every day. The water Planet toward it, climbing to meet its invisible hand. And once the moon turns away, the water falls back. This quiet tug-of-war has shaped the world for billions of years. Even the deepest seas are connected to anything beyond themselves.
Yet the tide is changing.
It is creeping farther inland now. Glaciers are melting in to its depths, warming seas are swelling its human anatomy, and shorelines are vanishing piece by piece. Islands we once believed eternal already are removed, paid down to just names on old maps.
And here's the truth most people do not want to handle: the hold will not stop for us.
We call it disaster. The wave calls it nothing at all. It simply remains, because it always has, taking and providing, sketching and erasing. It has erased entire continents before. It can do so again.
Are you able to envision the future?
The water sheets within the towns we built. Highways disappear underneath the dunes, their asphalt damaged and broken like previous bone. Systems fall in to the surf, turning into reefs where fish move through quiet glass halls. Monuments topple, destroyed and dispersed till they're indistinguishable from the stones of the seabed. Entire civilizations are paid down to parts, carried away by currents so powerful we could never swimming against them.
And when it occurs, the hold won't roar. It will not rage. It won't mourn.
It only will remember.
Since that's what the hold does. It is the planet's memory. Every life, every surprise, every loss is folded into its depths and moved forward. The tide has observed entire worlds rise and fall. It understands things no human language could actually hold.
However the tide is not just a thief. It is just a sculptor.
It produces life to the shore. It bears vitamins to estuaries and marshlands wherever new animals are born. It forms the sides of the earth, smoothing sharp stones into smooth rocks, remaking shores with every breath. Minus the hold, the planet's heartbeat would falter. Oceans would stagnate. Coastlines could wither.
Perhaps that's why we're drawn to it.
We go to the water's edge without generally knowing why. Young ones chase the retreating dunes, joking, then shriek when it rushes straight back toward them. People stay at the shoreline all night, hypnotized by the flow, letting the noise of their lives slide away. There is something timeless in the tide's breath — a thing that calls to the part people that recalls wherever we came from.
Since we came from the water once.
The hold carried life onto the land. It cradled the initial sensitive animals that dared to get from the shallows. And possibly that's why we experience so little position before it today — perhaps not since normally it takes everything from people, but because in certain deep, unspoken way, we all know it offered people every thing first.
Stay there long enough, and you'll start to notice the details. The calm pull at your ankles since it brings away. The hiss of pockets collapsing in the foam. The weak, very nearly individual sigh as it exhales onto the sand.
In the event that you hear directly, you might hear the wave suggesting a reality:
“Nothing you understand 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 boundaries we struggled conflicts to guard, the monuments we created to outlive time — the whole thing will undoubtedly be taken away, softened, and moved to the deep.
And yet… there is an odd ease in that.
As the wave tells people that individuals are element of anything bigger than ourselves. A thing that does not need people, but supports all of us the same. Every thing we do, everything we construct, every breath we take becomes part of their memory. The hold maintains it, also whenever we are gone.
You'll never know all that it carries. None folks will.
But the next time you are at the seaside, stop. Have the take at your feet. Watch the waves pull lines in the mud, then remove them without hesitation. Understand that the same hold handled lives you might never meet and may touch lives extended after yours.
It doesn't matter in the event that you forget.
The tide won't.
The tides will never reveal their secrets.
But when you're quiet enough, you could experience them in your bones.