Slack-tide

It is midsummer. The stuff of dreams, really. Blue skies embrace the landscape and time turns to liquid. Nothing is pressing. Nothing is important.

I have taken this time away from my family, spent forty-five minutes on a passenger ferry to arrive on Lasqueti Island with friends, Joanna and Elyot. Jenny greets us down at the dock where we load up the back of her pick-up. Two of us ride on top of coolers in the back as we drive along unpaved roads to her homestead. From there, it's wheelbarrows and footpaths down to the idyllic dwelling that perches on the edge of the bay.

I love this piece of the planet.

The next few days we live here, cloistered away from the rest of the world. On the deck that overhangs the water, we play scrabble, stretch and exchange stories. In the kitchen, we prepare delicious, fresh food from Jenny's garden: fava beans, artichokes, beets and peas. A bounty.

The tide slides out, the whole bay empties and becomes a perforated mud bed. My feet are delighted to walk across this yielding surface, to have mud ooze through my toes, wrap around my heels. At high tide, the sun mellows and water laps below the deck, inviting us to swim.

I marvel at the extreme nature of these tides. How low. How high. It is an amazing thing -- to witness the emptying of a bay. We discuss the poetics of this movement and Jenny tells us that there are some tides that have you walking way, way out, beyond the bay. Joanna says that in other parts of the world, tides are minimal, small two-step dances. Here, ebb and flow mean something.

Elyot reflects that there is a moment between tides. Three minutes. Where the tide is neither moving in, nor out. Slack-tide. This word loops in my mind like a long rope that is no longer taut, no longer strained from motion, only loose in the waiting. I wonder why I have never learnt this before, this simple beautiful fact: the ocean pauses. Slack-tide is the earth's khumbaka; the ocean is the planet's wide, soft diaphragm.

As the water draws into the bay for high tide, it is the breath entering the body. The pause -- slack-tide. Then, the tide empties, the way our body releases the breath. Again, slack-tide. And so the process goes. On and on for millennium.

Slack-tide is a non-moment and life is filled with these. Happenings we deem insignificant, irrelevant to the more important events in our lives. Like doing dishes. Or, dangling feet off the end of a dock. Or staring up at the sky.

When I first became aware of the internal slack-tide, I was drawn to it. Pause between my breaths? Space between my thoughts? I'd never thought of these things before. Soon enough, I discovered it isn't even a thinking thing. More like a quiet happening that presents itself in pranayama, in meditation, in asana.

Or, even on the edge of Lasqueti Island.

For the rest my time here, I embrace the poetry of slack-tide, the joy and beauty that dwells in those fleeting moments of stillness. The four days are over too quickly, but they have been a pause in and of themselves, nourishing me.

The ferry jostles us back to what Lasquetians call “the other side”. Here we disembark to smells of creosote, sounds of boat traffic and gulls. We haul our emptied coolers, our sacks of clothes and books from the dock to Elyot's truck.

I climb into the passenger's seat, lean back into it, grateful for my time away. Elyot starts the engine. It growls, then lurches us forward.

I think of the slack-tide and breathe in.

Ready for home.