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The roar of the sea was unknowable but there, quite obviously and sincerely there. The tide threw itself back and forth like a lazy animal wandering. The foam of the tide was bubbling like sparkling water. The foam fizzled and disappeared, an ethereal ephemeral thing that was sheer momentary. The life span of the foam was short and as such it was truly beautiful and perhaps the truest definition of beauty in all existence. Behind the foam was the far off sea that stretched into the threadbare horizon where marbled clouds sat as abstract concepts across the blueberry blue morning summer sky and the errant sun was nowhere to be seen because it was still pulling itself up in the isolated east waiting for its chance to fall into the western shore and for the day to spin round again, invert itself, close and end as it always does and the blue sky was lovely and cool as it was still morning and the terrible heat of the day was yet to come and turn the cool blue sky into something more vivid and heady and oppressive. The foaming tide went on with its business of repeated toil and the waves lapped at the shoreline slowly inching its way in and out and in and out as it had done for eternity. In spite of the enormity of the coastline the ancient rhythm of the tide was a happy constant.

The ancient rhythm of the tide was unknowable and overwhelming because it was an image that was doubtless universal and so obvious and utterly limitless, for the image of the rolling tide would be known for generations into eternity, and would also go backwards, and would have been known and appreciated throughout all of history and was in fact, then, ahistorical because it was an eternal thing and all this, the ancient rhythm of the tide governed by the pull of the moon that too was something ahistorical - but perhaps not quite eternal and also somehow fragile and distant and yet close and obvious and seemingly always there and with a curious and unknowable character of its own making and yet too it was a celestial body part of our universe and a huge part of our own existence yet so small and insignificant within, not just the solar system within which we orbit our sun, but infinitely smaller within the wider universe, so small and so horrendously insignificant that to think of how utterly small and pointless would be to drive a person insane - because to recognise the smallness of the moon within the wider cosmos was also to appreciate the pointlessness of being.

The clouds in the sky move slowly in the heat of June - dust flies up from the southern states and continents and brings with it a sense of dismal heat, the kind that sticks and stifles and doesn’t offer any opportunity to grow and breathe. Still, things could in theory be worse - the cool fist of winter has been broken clearly by the warm spring - but what will be the effect of this long period of warm weather?