Seaing the Sea by John Hegley
knee deep in the ocean
something in the ever-steady knee-cap lapping
motion
of the ocean
moves me to emotion
something infinitely playful
something totally and finally benign
in the briny
makes these four eyes of mine wet with weep
as if there wasn’t enough salt water already)
The photos in this entry were taken late one evening in summer 2007, around the spot where we were camped on the north Cornish coast. The environment surrounding us was formed by eons of geological processes, eroded and sculpted by wave, tide and climate, and colonised and adapted by all manner of plants and living creatures into a complex ecosystem. Much later, humans settled and made their own impact on the landscape through millennia of social and economic activity.
All of these processes continue, and all are interconnected. We’ve set out to understand and then explain this dynamic and complex environment. Hopefully our book can achieve this, but it is undoubtedly as much of a learning process for us, as we hope it will be for our readers.
