Wax. Wane. In. Out. Back. Forth. Push. Pull. Ebb. Flow. Expand. Contract. Tides are like that. Relationships are like that, too.
As you know, I am of the mountain west, from a place almost a 1,000 miles inland. Even though I’ve lived in a coastal state for over 30 years now, I’ve never given much thought to tides until I stayed at a friend’s beach house.
In the morning, the tide would be out, with yards of beach exposed. Seashells and kelp, pebbles and logs, scattered across enough exposed sand to afford a walk past the last house in her enclave, one of 12 in a row on Possession Sound, facing west toward the southern tip of Whidbey Island. After lunch, the tide crept in enough to notice, and by supper it was up to the seawall, lapping at the picnic table outside her living room. Watching this phenomenon play out in ways I hadn’t before made me think about the way tides manifest themselves in daily life away from the water. Specifically, it made me think about the way tides manifest themselves in friendships.
In his book Tides: The Science and Spirit of the Ocean, Jonathan White explores tidal relationships in beautiful prose:
In many cultures, there was a perceived “secret harmony” between the tide and human life. Flooding tides were a time of exuberance, prosperity, conception, birth. It was a time to make butter and sow clover. Ebbing tides were a time of melancholy, harvest, death. A woman’s menstrual cycle was the tide’s ebb and flow within her body.
The tide’s long, steady inhale and exhale is suggestive of a living being. Some thought the tides were the breathing of Gaia, the earth itself, and others suspected it was a large beast. Leonardo da Vinci was convinced of the latter and tried to calculate the size of its lung.
Spring tides and neap tides. King tides and bore tides.
I think there are nested tides, too. Tides within tides. Tides upon tides. Tides at the macro and the micro. The gravitational pull of the moon on the earth has a domino effect, pulling on everything, not just the ocean’s water:
High tide on the solid earth varies from half a foot to three feet and spreads over such a large distance – about ten thousand miles – that it’s not perceptible. For example, a high spring tide might raise the sidewalks and buildings of New York by a couple of inches. You could never detect this as you walk down Broadway, because everything rises and falls together over a six-hour period (unlike on the coast, where the ocean rises and falls relative to the beach).
and
We have a tide in our bodies, too (and even in our morning cup of coffee), but it’s barely discernible.
Culturally speaking, we are in a collective tide still ebbing from the pandemic. Intimately speaking, I see this in my friendships and with family, too. Relationships once at high tide, flooding with laughter and camaraderie, foaming and alive, now recede, revealing shores that at first appear lonely and barren but upon closer inspection once you walk across them, present camaraderie of a different sort, still and alive. Self-reflective and accepting as you notice objects in the sand once covered by water and inspect them, learning things about yourself, good and bad, soft and hard, tender and sweet.
Jonathan goes on to discuss the role of friction in the tide:
All this watery commotion is the result of friction – the rubbing, scraping, bouncing-off process that happens all around us. [T]hrough friction, it loses energy – lots of it. Some is absorbed in the ocean floor as heat, but most exerts a torque on the earth’s rotation, slowing ever so slightly the length of our days and, in turn, causing the moon to speed up and spiral away.
Thus, the moon, which causes the tide, is in turn pushed away by the tide.
What we witness when we sail through narrows is friction at work. Every whirlpool, every eddy, every dimple of tension is evidence of energy moving from the moon to the water and back to the moon.
Which is comforting. To think of yourself as the earth, your friends and family as the moon, and the tide as something influenced by your loved ones, but that never ends. It only ebbs and flows incessantly depending on where you are in relation to it.
Happy New Year. ❤
Almost four years post-pandemic, how are your relationships faring?
Things That Nourished My Writing: November - December 2023
FOOD
Aran Goyoaga’s Red Lentil Hummus
The sweet potato and tofu sandwich at The Other Coast Cafe in Ballard. OMG, so fricking good.
Homemade eggnog. Why did I wait so long?
LITERARY
Tides: The Science and Spirit of the Ocean by Jonathan White
FILM
The Boys in the Boat (of course!)
Napoleon (Joaquin Phoenix is chef’s kiss. I get nervous though these days about liking actors too much, afraid they’ll be revealed as sexual assault perpetrators…ugh).
MUSIC
I’m currently obsessed with this song, learning to play it on both piano and guitar.
Our Fischer & Sons upright piano, glossy and black, found on Craigslist.
PLACES
The dog-friendly ski trails off of West Chewuch Road outside Winthrop, Washington.
That liminal space between Christmas and New Year’s, when everything is nothing and nothing is everything.
PEOPLE
The wonderful students we hosted for Thanksgiving dinner via FIUTS. I will never forget that night!
Michal Friedrich, my dentist of 20 years whose brief conversation at the Rolling Huts I enjoyed so much.
, who shared her knowledge about commonplace books. Thank you!