Agate Scotland

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The seashore is a liminal place.
A place of both tranquillity and of trauma, of exposure and of shelter. A place of extremes. The origin of life, our Garden of Eden, one day to become the cesspool that begets our destruction.

Here the assorted debris of both the sea and the landscape collects and is collected, is gathered and is gathering. Treasures and poisons, traps and curiosities. Some creatures come here to spawn, and others to die. It is a place between the human world and a world unearthly and almost completely unknown. Especially when you take into account the true extent of the oceans depths, not only in mere water but also in silts, sands and gravels. What oddities writhe and pulsate in those black and sludgy deeps? When you gaze out to sea from the shore you stand on the threshold of possibility.

Many come here to swim, walk, meditate, laugh and share in a beautiful place. Few truly consider what the seashore really is: an ossuary, a hatchery, the moon's scrying mirror, a place of communion, of pilgrimage and discovery. Life into death and death into life. It's all there. The seashore is the diary drawn to abstraction of the largest and oldest animal on earth. The most haunted psyche in the known stars.

The ocean is also Mother Earth's last defence against humankind. Once she is finally swamped in cataracts of enmeshed plastic and poisoned with glugging slicks of oil and a myriad of excrement, the planet dies, and we along with it. A medusa then. If we truly stare her down in stubborn self-destruction, humankind's advance in the universe ceases, we turn to stone. Our species will return to the earth, fossilized, placated and silent at last and then in turn to the encroaching seas. One day perhaps to be excavated by explorers farther on in time.

"His mind is scarred by stone,
Trauma and anguish,
Mark the way between worlds."