Shore lines.

The tide is out now, exposing the rocky, forest-backed shoreline which leans it`s seaweedy elbows into the gently lapping ocean. I had planned to walk north along the trail in Ruckle Park and take photographs as I go but the day has turned overcast and the dramatic colours and shadows I had expected to find are flattened now by the grey filter overhead. I must adjust to this new light and seek an alternate vision. I begin to look more carefully at the rock and driftwood-stacked world beneath my feet.

This is a more subtle landscape when colours grey and shadows fade, - perfect for portraits like the one I just made of the farmer beside his tractor making hay in the farm fields behind me. I begin to see these beach forms as portraits too. Logs stretch their silvered limbs like human figures and I treat them as such, picturing the expressively sprawling torsos and truncated bodies as pausing for a moment in their long life dance towards sliverdom. The beach I have found is on a fault line and hard volcanic rock surges to the surface between the sandstone layers that surround it. Some of that drama lies locked still in the photos I find when my interest focuses down to the detail, to the furrowed rock-faces beneath my feet. Among the bushy tangles of roots and twigs that drape down the bank behind the beach, delicate ocean spray blossoms tremble in the breeze; something here is living and renewing but I wait for a breath to set one trembling so it will blur in the photo, making this passing moment scarce recorded amid the dominant theme.

I creep forward, my eyes to the ground, seeing a universe at my feet: my little monkey life so ephemeral amid this eternity where land meets ocean and the smallest rock will outlive me many times over. This is a cathedral of sorts, which echoes with all that is transient; all that lasts forever.