I remember as a child my summer holidays in Norfolk, walking out across and through estuary mud and out to the Scolt Head sandy dunes. Here we would stay all day, playing along the beach/sea edge. The walk had to be taken at low tide and carefully marked with cairns and markers so as not to fall foul in the sucking mud. I remember vividly, the bubbles popping and breathing like a sinister monster. I was aware of the dangers of quick mud and a fast incoming tide. I was aware that my legs were shorter than my siblings and cousins.
We were striking out first before the adults. I was always the youngest of a tribe of cousins, brothers, sisters, and school friends. Of course, I wanted to be included but was terrified of the Grendel. The causeway could feel like the substance of nightmares. It was a mud that was black, lustrous, and succulent. Shoe sucking, predatory and black mud. Dark oozing up between the toes rendering naked feet into those of a goblin mud. A constant eye was held out for the slime-covered ghoulish hag that was known to rise up out of the sludgy ooze and capture little children and take them down; down into the turbidity below.
As we walked, I would hold the view of the horizon, of Scolt Head Island, our destination for the day. Amidst mist and smell of sour mud, we would emerge out to the last water crossing. Now I could feel the mud begin to lose its suckers and it’s calling on my soul to take. Now my feet felt a drying out onto baked mud with harsh cracks pressing into my under souls of toes and heels. Moving into relief as I ran on to sand cool, smooth and hard sand, golden sand squidging between my toes. Next dry sand, a grit that sandpapered my feet clean from lingering in the dark night of the mud. A run for the golden sand, the welcoming dunes and the beach waiting for castles to be built and kites to be chased.
At the other end of the day we would return back home in a boat on the incoming tide, our morning path hidden by serene water under an orange setting sun. Fun-loving sailboats now tacked across the bubbling witches’ cauldron in a picture of romantic serenity.
Now today here we are, November 2020, in the tipping place where the low tide turns in on itself, hovering in indecision, the very water waits for the gravitational pull of the ancient cosmic laws of change. Our world stage hovers on waiting for the new moon to rise this weekend when the moonlight will begin to shed more light up the estranged landscape. Listening you can hear the eerie music of the other worlds in the seamless shift, in the cosmic breath, breathing us. It’s as if the universe pauses to bless life with the inevitability of eternal returning tides. This momentum of shifting, tipping like sand in an overturned hourglass is indeed occurring in the very now of things. There is a deep sensing of an eternal hand on the hourglass of this dream?
We will feel the tide change before we see the water advancing along the sands of time. And it is that for now we are suspended – something is being rearranged and it is for us to stay the course of what we know to be true.
This last low tide, pulled by the Dark Goddess herself, exposed so much of what had not been seen before. Pulling back with a strong current, exposing that which remains held in the dark ocean depths. It is as if, in the sour smell of an extremely low tide, we circle around the exposed litter of the human family, the traumas of shipwrecks while also discovering the gem of new life and wonder looking back up at us from pockets of pooling ancient waters.
While we are still here on the mudflats of the last four years, let us encircle what we have faced and what we have experienced. Let us take in what arises out of this naked seabed. Let us take it in and know of its existence, before the warm waters of a rising tide come to erase from our eyes and allow what we have seen to swim away again into the ocean of drifting memory and potential forgetfulness.
We stand out here where tidal flats run into the horizon, witnessing the sacred liminal holding, together. May we fully look and take note before the incoming tide swallows this all back into the oceans of memories. The seagulls circle above our heads. The waders run with precession across the life teeming, air pocket blowing hum of a wilder frontier. Watery tidal pooled life lays contained and waiting for the freedom of incoming waves. We today are far from the seaweed borders that mark activity of past connections, we are out in the mud flats of our lives. Yet there is tender new light calling us to gently lean into the turning tide. A call to take care and to not meet with a Kelpie dressed head to toe in sea asparagus. In the dark of the mud, the sacred and the profane dwell, revealing themselves in the magic of mystery, of the poised and inevitable. It is the turning place of generous tides, of life come and go, pulling out, surging in. A force wild and uncontrollable. Do we have the skill of moving and being in the time of currents and gravitational pull? To surrender to being a part of unfolding creation?
Pay attention to that moment when the waters surge back along the beaches. Let us not be added to the debris of the oceans underworld. Let us honor where we have been for then, all the sweeter the returning tide will taste. Something sacred is moving.
Sarah Maclean Bicknell
November 2020
Top Photo Credit: Andreas Kretsch | Middle Photo Credit: Francesco Ungaro