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20—Slack Tide

To: Friends and Family
Subject: Slack Tide
It’s slack tide—the hour or so of transition between high and low tides, a time when tidal currents are in balance. The rhythms of the place have slowed to a mediative stillness. The gliding of the heron through the shallows, the squawk of a gull, the riffle of a breeze, each just a passing thought through the Great Mind of it All.

I’ve been enjoying my afternoon tea and sharing reflections on changing tides with four of my traveling companions: Rachel Carson, Albert Einstein, Itzhak Bentov, and Lao-tzu. 
You’re undoubtedly familiar with Rachel, Einstein, and Master Lao but perhaps not Bentov, a scientist, inventor, mystic, and author of Stalking the Wild Pendulum: On the Mechanics of Consciousness

Bentov got the whole conversation started by recounting the experiment conducted by Dr. Frank Brown, Jr. at Northwestern University in Evanston, IL. Brown had live oysters shipped from Long Island to Evanston in a tightly sealed container filled with sea water. Oysters open and close their valves in rhythm with the tides, and initially Brown’s oysters remained in sync with the tides in Long Island Sound. Within two weeks, however, they were opening and closing in sync with the moon as it passed over Evanston.

“There were tides in the new earth,” says Rachel, “long before there was an ocean. In response to the pull of the sun the molten liquids of the earth’s whole surface rose in tides that rolled unhindered around the globe and only gradually slackened and diminished as the earthly shell cooled, congealed, and hardened.”

I leafed through the tide table calculated for Tillamook. Even in this uncertain existence, the daily cycle of tides has been calculated to the tenth of a foot and exact minute. 


Spring tides, the highest, occur not just in spring but twice a month when the sun and moon are either opposite one another or aligned.
Neap tides, the lowest, occur when the sun and moon are at right angles.

“Mathematics are well and good,” interjects Einstein, “but nature keeps dragging us around by the nose.”

Unperturbed, Bentov goes on about wave energy and how all movement, including smell and sound, expresses itself in waves. The way waves interact can heighten, alter, or flatten them. 
A roomful of pendulum clocks out of sync with one another will eventually fall into sync, something called sympathetic vibration.
Tidal currents affect every part of the sea down to its deepest trenches. Wind by comparison generates only surface currents. Whatever the action, however, every water molecule knows what every other water molecule is doing.

In just the short time I’ve been away from Las Vegas, the town of cards has resolved itself into something that feels like the residue of an unsettling dream. But what is it that drew me here? I’m growing impatient.

“Who can wait quietly while the mud settles?” asks Master Lao, his words floating across twenty-five centuries. “Who can remain still until the moment of action?”
This ancient and enigmatic man can be so annoying.

During minus tide, the moon pulls back the ocean from the intertidal zone that is otherwise inaccessible. During a recent minus tide, I found that it’s possible to walk around Maxwell Mountain in Oceanside into this world undefined by human habitation. 

A mist hovered over the air saturated with the salty damp mystery of the primal. Along with two-dozen or so people, I moved with the muted and somnambulant feeling of a dream through black outcroppings covered with orange and purple starfish, green anemones, and mussels. Long strands of kelp, sugar wrack, and black pine lay across rock and sand like the hair of a sleeping goddess. Shells littered the exposed seafloor as if the goddess had grown careless with her jewels. 


I came upon a woman searching for something she’d lost. Or so I thought until I asked if she needed help. No, she replied with a laugh, she was looking for agates. Reaching into her pocket, she pulled out a handful of small white rocks, some polished, some roughhewn, all translucent like water and light solidified. 
Then with an air of magic, she slid from her other pocket a burnt-orange incandescence the size of a golf ball. “Carnelian,” she said lowering her voice as if not to disturb the stone’s mystical properties. I wanted one and joined in the search.

In spite of my efforts, I found nothing and grew irked as the woman stooped then stooped again and again. 

A swoosh of incoming ocean reminded us that intertidal guests should not overstay their welcome. As we headed back toward Maxwell Mountain, I spotted some green stones and red, rich and lustrous at the edge of a sandy pool. 
“Jasper!” exclaimed the agate collector as I stooped to collect one of each, along with my intertidal lesson on the importance of seeking not what I want but what is given.

Suddenly, a man came running at us in the wrong direction, eyes worried and wide, cupping an orange starfish in his hands. “Found it stranded,” he said. “Leg’s broken off. I’m trying to find it a place to attach it.”  
“Starfish can regenerate...,” I reassured him.
However, the man was too worried to hear. Dashing past, he deposited his broken star next to a pile of stars, but then lingered in doubt until an incoming wave sent him scurrying after us, leaping and dodging the ocean now closing in on the base of Maxwell Mountain.

Slack tide is over. 
What to read next?

“Reading after a certain time diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits,” notes Einstein. “Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking.”
“Who can wait quietly while the mud settles?” asks Master Lao.



Next: Stillness in Motion

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