Of time and tides

Every summer for twenty years, my husband and I went up to Cape Cod to visit friends. My husband’s college friend C, best man at our wedding, grew up mid-Cape, in Brewster. These visits predated both our marriages and continued with C’s wife J and eventually their two little boys, and then our little boy. Croquet, board games, and beach trips by day, lobster and mussels, and reading in the evenings.

One place we never missed was the long walk through Wing Island via the Cape Cod Museum of Natural History (founded by our friend C’s father, a well-known naturalist and writer of many beloved books).1 After hiking through a pitch pine woodland and walking weathered planks through mud flats and a salt marsh, you arrive at the sublime Brewster Flats. It’s North America’s most extensive tidal flats, about ten miles long and 12,000 acres. The low tide recedes up to two miles in some places, exposing sand grooved with lovely ripples, grasses, tidal pools, and clam beds.

I would sit on a towel with my watercolors and paint. Later, I understood these sessions to be a conversation with the place, a conversation on its terms—the breeze on my skin, the sun’s heat, the salty-earthy smells and cries of gulls. The beaches, coves, and trees called to me with their colors and light. I mixed paints and worked them on the paper, much as I would choose words to form sentences. It’s no small thing that painting outdoors feels good and gives me peace, that I love doing it. It’s a practice of reciprocity.

“If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream all the time.” ~ Marcel Proust

Instructions for living a life:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.
~ Mary Oliver, stanza 4, from "Sometimes"

“The cure for anything is salt water: sweat, tears or the sea.” ~ Isak Dinesen

“It is only when we find peace within that we will be able to live in peace with our environment.” ~ Dalai Lama

Each season, we donate 30% of paid subscriptions to a worthy environmental cause. This season, it’s Indigenous Climate Action. They envision a world with sovereign and thriving Indigenous Peoples and cultures leading climate justice for all. Track past and current recipients here.

If you enjoyed this, please share and comment. It’s always wonderful to hear from you. Stay safe and take good care.