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My feet bring me here at low tide. I clamber across rocks that test my balance with their sharp teeth.
The water’s slippery translucence invites me to lay aside the day’s thoughts. Heeding the advice of a rock pool- regular: “just watch and wait… and eventually you will start to see things”, I allow patience to undo me.
Once I become still, I notice movement. With time, each pool opens, kaleidoscopic. A periwinkle slowly revolves. A limpet slides across a patch of rock. Then, the blossoming of a fan worm, unfurling its feather boa for the visiting tide.
There is a scuttle and a splash as two crabs flee the tentacles of a hungry octopus who leaps out the water after them. Losing, he skulks back into the pool, retracts his eight appendages and reinvents himself as a sulky lump, matched to the nearest rock. I watch him for a while. Me, squatting at the poolside. He, so still, but for his pulsating centre as he breathes.
As my eye adjusts, they appear, creatures gathering form out of the camouflage. My mind begins to dance and sing and fly. Each pool is a unique suburb of this shoreside city. On its outskirts are the hard-shelled: tough littorina, colonies of volcano barnacles and limpets tending their algae gardens. In deeper water, tiny cuttlefish orbit like planets, condensing the universe before me. Where rocks form channels, sea hares, those lush marine snails, graze leisurely on soft frills of seaweed. I am mesmerised by their fashions, some wearing earth tones flecked with pale, others in pink with rainbow detail. I wish to shrink and undulate with them in their perfect unawareness of clumsy humanity.
When its surface settles, so much is revealed. The water mirrors my mind.
The water’s slippery translucence invites me to lay aside the day’s thoughts. Heeding the advice of a rock pool- regular: “just watch and wait… and eventually you will start to see things”, I allow patience to undo me.
Once I become still, I notice movement. With time, each pool opens, kaleidoscopic. A periwinkle slowly revolves. A limpet slides across a patch of rock. Then, the blossoming of a fan worm, unfurling its feather boa for the visiting tide.
There is a scuttle and a splash as two crabs flee the tentacles of a hungry octopus who leaps out the water after them. Losing, he skulks back into the pool, retracts his eight appendages and reinvents himself as a sulky lump, matched to the nearest rock. I watch him for a while. Me, squatting at the poolside. He, so still, but for his pulsating centre as he breathes.
As my eye adjusts, they appear, creatures gathering form out of the camouflage. My mind begins to dance and sing and fly. Each pool is a unique suburb of this shoreside city. On its outskirts are the hard-shelled: tough littorina, colonies of volcano barnacles and limpets tending their algae gardens. In deeper water, tiny cuttlefish orbit like planets, condensing the universe before me. Where rocks form channels, sea hares, those lush marine snails, graze leisurely on soft frills of seaweed. I am mesmerised by their fashions, some wearing earth tones flecked with pale, others in pink with rainbow detail. I wish to shrink and undulate with them in their perfect unawareness of clumsy humanity.
When its surface settles, so much is revealed. The water mirrors my mind.
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