In his book, the Science and the Spirit of the Ocean, Jonathan White writes about the ocean tides and discusses the influence of the sun and the moon on tidal motion, and he also emphasizes that everything in the universe, and especially tides, has a tendency to vibrate: flowers, wind, steel, mountains. Everything vibrates. And that is the heart of the tides.
And the petals of late summer vibrate, too, unseen, and they follow the swirls and changes of the Earth, and so if I watch an afternoon in August, I can know that the high tide of summer is giving way to the tide of autumn.
Of course I cannot see it taking place, but I know that the
fixed image of what I do see is only one fixed frame of the chaos of countless frames, that I am encountering the chaos, as Johnathan White says, "the presence of the invisible, the passing of the unseen," of a tidal wave so vast it seems to be motionless and formless and rolls around us and through us.
