BEND BREATHE BUILD

 

    ©tedorè

Some trees grow toward the wind instead of away from it. They lean into the salt air, into the impossible, their roots gripping stone where nothing should survive. This is the first instruction: that resistance shapes us more beautifully than shelter ever could. That we become most ourselves at the edges, where the solid world meets its dissolution. 

The coast teaches a different kind of solitude, the kind that expands rather than isolates. Here, the body becomes an antenna, a receiver, a conductor of all the frequencies the inland world drowns out. I feel the pull of tides I cannot see, the shift of weather systems gathering themselves beyond the horizon. To stand here is to remember that we are porous, permeable, made mostly of the same saltwater that surrounds us. The self we carry so carefully inland dissolves at the edges. What remains is truer. 

The earth keeps its own archive. Layer upon layer, pressed into permanence, each stratum a sentence in the autobiography of time. What appears as stillness is actually accumulation, the patient´s work of becoming, written in sediment and stone. We, too, are made this way: built from everything we have witnessed and survived, compressed into the singular form we carry through the world. Our depths are visible only to those willing to look closely enough to read them.