Predawn cobalt, stretched taught across the firmament. A lone bird call—a sooty shearwater, or, as it is known locally, tītī—hails from beyond the distant horizon, the morning sun’s rays only just beginning to signal their intentions. Small waves, small acknowledgements to the moon, lap on coarse sand. To those willing to listen—to truly hear—the voice of the tītī speaks of solitude, resilience earned by time at sea, and ultimately, esoteric knowledge of the constant flux of the ocean, of life. It is an acknowledgement of survival against the struggle; thought survival is a practice and not a process, and as such the battle must be fought each day. And there is no “winning”, only survival—experience and observation—until the day comes where there is no longer survival.
The above is not meant to be read as an admission of defeat or a lamentation, though rather as an acceptance, radical acceptance of the natural ebb and flow of change. And as with the call of the tītī, so, too, the call of the human; our species so desperate to be heard, to celebrate our efforts to push back the decay, to slow the constant churn of the tides of entropy. An unwinnable war, and yet a necessary experience—indeed, the only experience of sentience.
These words are intended to serve a similar purpose—a call, if you will—a humble documentation of attempts to momentarily stifle entropy, observations of our follies and failures; our sandcastles washed away in the tides.
