Tidal Meditations by Nana-Francisca Schottländer

We walk out to where the human‑made world ends. All the way out to where constant transformation is sufficient unto itself. We step beyond the beach, into the tidal flats’ no man’s land.

Let our feet glide across the exposed seabed. Feel it like a child thinking with the body while exploring the world. Body to body with a vast being, lying there breathing, slowly and incessantly.

One day I lie down, right at the threshold between land and sea. I merge with the landscape.

I see the sky, see the clouds, and see the water drawing them in long, slow, gliding movements. It is like watching one’s beloved approach on a wedding day. Like seeing a lover come closer after a long absence.

We lie there, I and the rest of the beings of the tidal flats, waiting for the sea’s cold and all‑embracing hold. It arrives.

The transition is imperceptible—slowly sky and sea become one, until only a thin, dark horizon line marks a fixed point within the moving infinity.
The world turns and dances in unbroken reflection.

The water reaches one ear. First with fleeting touches of wave‑fingers. Then the world drowns in a quiet, muddy bubble, where my breath is amplified in intimate contrast to the wind and the cries of birds from the world above the surface in my other ear.

The sky sinks to eye level, and the water rises so that one eye is above and one below the surface. The eye beneath the surface closes at first, frightened by the vast, muddy body of water, then surrenders to the turquoise‑brown, translucent shadowland.

Breathing begins to follow the rhythm of the waves to avoid being swallowed by the water. Wave: exhale. Inhale quickly. Exhale, slowly.

The water reaches one nostril. Flows in. I open my mouth and place my tongue as a barrier. The salt of the water mixes with my saliva and unites in a dance in and out with my breath.

Sky and sea dance with one another. Lines dissolve. Directions cease to matter.

I lie in the mud and disappear — out into the horizon line, inward into myself.

Dissolving into a trembling connection with everything.

With the sky, endlessly reflected and seeping unhindered into my eyes.

With the beings in the mud beneath me, who have already included me in their food chain and bite into my body.

I surrender to the sum of it all.

For a moment, for an eternity, we are simply here.

Inseparably together.