Cadence of the Tides

“Remember you are dust.”

3:30 in the morning and wide awake, I go to the cliffs.

In pre-dawn darkness and heavy fog, I only hear the cracking of the waves below, the eternal rhythm of a nearly endless ocean from which that early living creature commencing all known life crawled to the shore.

I feel it in my heartbeat.

The rhythm of the ages, of ancestors I cannot fathom, of a mother that I miss, the loved ones yet to be conceived in the ebb and flow of mortal life.

We come and go and come again, the cadence of the tides. The red clay sticks to my shoes. The sun rises for another day.

“And to dust you shall return.”