Low Tide

What gets revealed when the tide of our lives goes out...

Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash

Place and geography stirs the soul.

I’ve come to the shore of North Carolina to a small barrier island. I’ve come to this same island beach for decades. There is so much history here. Those memories began when I was a boy and I have repeated those memories in some ways with my own children and their children, my grandchildren. This is a generational space—a sort of holy land—an island that has been both refuge and fun!

This place is so very important in the Smith family that one of our sons, named his own son, “Holden” for Holden Beach—this amazing place where I am right now. This particular son of ours was born while we were here vacationing 41 years ago. There are deep memories, as you can imagine. Most of the memories are wonderful. A few are traumatic. Two separate trips to the ER at the local hospital interrupted our lives unexpectedly and in shocking ways. This is life regardless of where one finds themselves. Each space and place we live or visit contains the marvelous and the hard. All of this is at work within our own geography of our souls.

While there are closer beaches that we could have visited, somehow, we both felt the pull, that inner tide, to come back here. They oysters are fantastic. The shrimp is fresh. The beach is unpopulated. There are no hotels—only cottages—each one filled with generational memories. We are not the only ones to come here. Yet, it remains unspoiled to commercialization and crowds.

The shore reveals so much and stirs up for me, the past and present as well as the future are all here in one fleeting moment. Yet all these moments came flooding into me yesterday at low tide.

My wife and I took our beach chairs out on our first morning at low tide. When you live in the mountains, one doesn’t keep the tides in mind. But when you are at the shore, tides matter. You pay attention to the tides. Tides matter. Tides matter a lot. Every place stands ready to teach us when we have eyes and hearts to see.

When the water recedes on the beach, there is naked sand and in this nakedness, as I sat there I began to feel the emotions of it all. I could see in my mind, my father, long dead on the same beach with me as a boy. And in a nano second, more memories surfaced as the waters pulled even further back. Being here with my own boys and building the same drip castles that the low tides erased.

I came here to write one of my books, Soul Custody some years back. It was here, on this very island that I first connected the dots of rhythm, sabbath, sabbatical, and the importance of place in the human soul. I have come here during storms and sunshine; during cold as well as heat. Through many seasons, there is this constancy of the tides. High tide—then low tide. The colors of the beach cottages change but the sameness of the tides never change.

It was here for the past two mornings, that I wrote this new poem, “Low Tide.”

See if you can relate. See what the low tide I describers brings up in you. Share it if you’d like.